“Take the assistance of a solar microscope, and you will succeed still better in catching the outlines; the design also will be more correct....
“There are faces which will not allow of the most trifling alteration in the silhouette, or strengthen or weaken the outline but a single hair’s-breadth, and it is no longer the portrait you intended; it is one quite new, and of character essentially different.”
In this work of silhouette-making and physiognomical study, Lavater wished the whole world to co-operate with him, as Goëthe testified. On a long journey down the Rhine, he had the portraits taken by his draughtsman, Schmoll, of a great number of important people. This served the secondary purpose of interesting his sitters in his work. He also asked artists to send him drawings for his purpose, and wrote much on the physiognomical character of the figures in the pictures of such artists as Raphael and Vandyck.
Goëthe was intensely interested, and there is much of his correspondence extant on the subject. Enthusiastic at first, his zeal seems to have waned. On June 23rd, 1774, Lavater arrived at Goëthe’s house with Schmoll, and portraits were taken of the author of “The Sorrows of Werther,” and of his parents.
A year later, in August, 1775, Goëthe writes, imploring Lavater, “I beg you will destroy the family picture of us; it is frightful. You do credit neither to yourself nor to us. Get my father cut out, and use him as a vignette, for he is good. I do entreat of you to do this; you can do what you like with my head too, but my mother must not be recorded like that.”
An amusing sequel to this correspondence is that when the third volume of Lavater’s “Physiognomy” appeared containing her husband’s portrait alone, the councillor’s wife was extremely offended, and says that evidently the author did not think her face worthy to appear.
A scrap-book full of these machine- and scissor-made silhouettes, with copious notes made by Lavater on the character of the sitters, judged by the shadow portraits, is one of the chief treasures in the collection of Mr. Wellesley, and forms an important item in silhouette history in its use for scientific purposes.
A machine for the use of amateurs is owned by Dr. Beetham, descendant of Mrs. Edward Beetham, the clever silhouettist of Fleet Street. This machine for taking silhouettes is a box about the size of a cigar box. One end has a lens glued into a sliding block or frame for focusing purposes. A piece of looking-glass reflects the object on to a piece of frosted glass on the top of the box. The subject is drawn from this reduced shadow.
There were others besides Lavater who published advice as to the best way of taking silhouettes.
In “A Detailed Treatise on Silhouettes: their Drawing, Reduction, Ornamentation and Reproduction,” published in 1780, the author, after many allusions to prisma, cylinder, pyramid, cone, the sun and moon, and perpendicular and horizontal lines, gives indispensable rules for the silhouetteur:—