For such decorative purposes elaborate instructions are given. “Take a nice clear sun-glass and clean it with powdered chalk and clean linen to remove all grease and dirt. Cover this glass on one side with finely powdered white lead mixed with a little gum-water. When this is dry take the silhouette, which has been cut out of strong paper, place it on the powdered surface, and trace round the outline with a needle; remove the silhouette, and scrape away all the white within the drawn line. Thus one obtains a transparent silhouette, which can be turned into a black one by laying a piece of black velvet at the back of the glass, or if not velvet, fine black cloth or taffeta or paper.”
This silhouette recipe maker also suggests that the cut-out black silhouettes can be stuck on to the glass with Venetian turpentine, and the glass then treated with the white covering; or one can use tinfoil, which forms a mirror.
This brings us back to the background treatment for painted silhouettes without the aid of shadowgraphy and scissor-work, so that we need not repeat the various kinds.
In this remarkable book, which is in the possession of Professor Dr. Th. Slettner (Münich), and for a description of which we are indebted to Herr Julius Leisching, a further description of silhouette-making is given:—“By sticking together three or four sheets of paper and working at the back with a polishing steel, one can actually make a profile portrait in slight relief out of a cut-out silhouette in white paper, ‘giving it the appearance of a marble tablet or a plaster cast done by a sculptor,’” adds this enthusiast.
A treatise on this method exists in English, entitled “Papyro-Plastics; or the Art of Modelling in Paper, with Directions to cut, fold, join, and paint the same,” with eight plates, published in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
Mention is also made of silhouettes in enamel on copper for snuff-boxes, lockets, and rings, and the black profile portraits on porcelain in the German volume.
Finally, the author praises a process by which, by means of a stencil, one can make one hundred copies a minute, and the reproduction of the silhouette portrait by woodcut and copper-plate impressions.
A second book appeared simultaneously, if not immediately before the treatise. It was published by Römhild at Leipzig, and in the following year (1780) Philip Heinrich Perrenon brought out a third, which is called “Description of Bon Magic; or the Art of Reduplicating Silhouettes easily and surely.”
The principal process is one which the author describes as “so simple that every woman who can make silhouettes can practise it as well as the best artist.”
“Take a piece of flat tin, polish it on one side, put the drawing on it and cut out the tin accordingly, and the form is obtained. Rub this form on the side to be printed off on a flat stone with sand. Damp some paper, and make a black mixture out of linseed oil and pine-soot. Make a pair of balls of horsehair covered with sheepskin. Get a small piece of hat felt. Blacken the shape or form with the black mixture put on with the horsehair ball; place it on the table, and over it, on the blackened side, the damp paper, on this a few sheets of waste paper and then the felt. Now nothing but the press is required; this consists of a rolling-pin, which can be made by any turner. Roll it over, and when the paper is taken away the silhouette, en Bon Magic, appears printed off.”