When a likeness is to be taken, accompanied with the external “part of a room or buildings,” a camera obscura is used; the reflected shadows are received on paper, the outlines are carefully marked, and then “either fill’d up with Indian ink or coloured, or cut out as above directed.”
[Printed, 4d. No Drawings.]
On December 22nd, 1806, Charles Schmalcalder applied for a patent for a machine of the same type, but of more complicated construction. We give the abridged specification, for it forms a humble though important link in silhouette history, having been much used by itinerant silhouettists at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
A.D. 1806, December 22.—No. 3000.
Schmalcalder, Charles.—“A delineator, copier, proportionometer, for the use of taking, tracing, and cutting out profiles, as also copying and tracing reversely upon copper, brass, hard wood, cardpaper, paper, asses’ skin, ivory, and glass, to different proportions, directly from nature, landscapes, prospects, or any object standing or previously placed perpendicularly, as also pictures, drawings, prints, plans, caricatures, and public characters.” This apparatus is composed of (1) a hollow rod “screw’d together, and from two to twelve feet, or still longer, chiefly made of copper or brass, sometimes wood, or any metal applicable;” the diameter is from half an inch to two inches and upwards, according to the length; one end carries a fine steel tracer, made to slide out and in and fastened by a milled-head screw, and in the other is “a round hole to take up either a steel point, blacklead pencil, or any other metallic point, which may be fastened therein by a mill’d-head screw;” (2) a tube about ten inches long and sufficient in diameter to allow the rod “to slide easily and without shake in it;” (3) a ball (in which the tube is fixed) “moveable between two half sockets;” (4) a frame of wood about two and a half or three feet long (the length depending on the length of the rod) and supported by two brackets; (5) a swing-board attached to the frame; (6) a clamp-screw; (7) a hook hanging on a string for the rod to rest in; (8) a weight on the back of the frame, connected thereto by a hook, “to which is attached a string forming a pulley, serving to prevent the point from acting upon the paper when not wanted.” Through the sides of the frame are holes at certain distances corresponding with marks on the rod, and “in copying any original, supposing to the size of ⅛, ¼, ½, ¾, &c.,” the swing-board and clamp-screw “must be transplanted to the different holes and divisions corresponding.” The paper or other substance is fastened to the swing-board by screws or is placed in a brass frame which slides up and down the board, and is kept in position by a spring. “The machine is fixed either to a partition in any room or to any piece of wood portable, and so constructed as to be easily fixed upright with a screw-clamp upon a table or any other stand.” In turning the rod round in the sockets “the tracer and point in the two ends of the rod must remain in the centre, to obtain which sometimes an adjustment with four screws” is required.
Directions are given for using the apparatus in taking profiles, in copying and tracing pictures, landscapes, &c., and in copying from nature “landscapes or whatever object exposes itself to view.”
[Printed, 6d. Drawing. See “Repertory of Arts,” vol. 10 (second series), p. 241; “Rolls Chapel Reports,” 7th Report, p. 195.]
Still lower was the shadow portrait to fall, when another contrivance was invented to trick the public into the belief that magic played a part in producing the likeness. An automatic figure was taken round the country which it was claimed could draw silhouettes. Somewhere about 1826 the automaton was brought to Newcastle, and is described as a figure seated in flowing robes with a style in the right hand, which by machinery scratched an outline of a profile on card, which the exhibitor professed to fill up in black. The person whose likeness was to be taken sat at one side of the figure, near a wall. “One of our party,” says an eye-witness, “detected an opening in the wall, through which a man’s eye was visible. This man, no doubt, drew the profile, and not the automaton. Ladies’ heads were relieved by pencillings of gold.”
The son of the great, little Madame Tussaud, who began her wax modelling in the Palais Royal in the days of the French Revolution, taking death-masks of many of the guillotine victims, thus advertises in 1823:—“J. P. Tussaud (son of Madame T.) respectfully informs the nobility, gentry, and the public in general, that he has a machine by which he takes profile likenesses. Price, 2s. to 7s., according to style.”
This machine was probably of the kind described by Blenkinsopp in Notes and Queries:—“A long rod worked in a movable fulcrum, with a pencil at one end and a small iron rod at the other, was the apparatus. He passed the rod over the face and head, and the pencil at the other end reproduced the outline on a card, afterwards filled in with lamp-black.”