J. Gapp was another early Victorian profile cutter, whose skill with the scissors is markedly in advance of his artistic sense. In his advertisement of about the year 1829, at the back of a boy’s full-length in Eton suit and aggressively large white collar, he describes himself as “The original Profilist for cutting accurate Likenesses attends daily at the Third Tower in the centre of the Chain Pier (Brighton), and begs to observe that he has no connection with any other person, and that he continues to produce the most wonderful Likenesses, in which the expression and peculiarity of character are brought into action in a very superior style on the following terms:—Full-length likenesses at 2s. 6d. each, two of the same 4s., or in bronze 4s.; profile to the bust 1s., two of the same 1s. 6d., or in bronze 2s. Ladies and gentlemen on horseback 7s. 6d.; single horses 5s.; dogs 1s. 6d. N.B.—A variety of interesting small cuttings for Ladies’ Scrap-books.”
Here we have a clue to the great scrap-book mania of the day. Everyone, from royalty downwards, collected treasures to paste in scrap-books, and Gapp, of the Chain Pier, like Hubard, was clever enough to offer to supply the want of interesting items.
E. Haines, patronised by the Royal Family, also worked on the Chain Pier at Brighton, at “the first left-hand tower.” He describes himself as a “Profilist and Scissorgraphist.” His trade label is on the back of a fine full-length portrait of a man, once in the collection of Mr. Montague J. Guest. There is great vigour and character in Haines’ work; the specimen before us is untouched with gold.
G. Atkinson (1815) also describes himself as “Silhouettist to the Royal Family.” He lived at Windsor, and there are some fine portraits of George III. and his sons, which, though stilted and without imagination, show considerable skill in the cutting. A group cut out in black and touched with gold was exhibited by G. Sharland, Esq., at the Royal Amateur Art Society’s Exhibition in 1911.
Though there are many other scissor-workers who might be mentioned, and examples described of graceful women in hooped skirts and fascinating side ringlets, maidens in cottage bonnets, and dainty children whose ringing voices one can almost hear as the shadow pageant passes, yet sufficient examples have been mentioned to show how popular was the craze for black portrait cutting, and how large a branch it was of the black profile processes.
That silhouettes are kept in the reference library of our National Portrait Gallery, because, on account of their life-like resemblance, they are of great value to the authorities in the identification of unknown portraits, is a fact which speaks for the great historic value of these pictorial records. In the cuttings of Edouart there is the ego of the man or woman as well as the bodily form. A gesture, the poise of the body, the arrested movement of the limbs, are shown with more than photographic correctness—when photography was as yet unborn. In the picture of a blind man we see by the tilt of the chin, the angle of the head, that, like all so afflicted, the man is exercising senses which are dormant in those who have sight. The simple black outline of the American deaf and dumb poet Nack, by this master-cutter, is instinct with the patient silence of the dumb, the aloofness of the deaf. Fine oil paintings and miniatures give us a man or woman interpreted through the senses of the artist and idealised or distorted through the alchemy of the artist’s mind. The shadow portrait is nature herself, and its very simplicity of line imposes a keener effect on the mind of the student, because there are no contours to confuse the outline.
CHAPTER VI.
AUGUST EDOUART AND HIS BOOK.
The introduction of the name Silhouette into England seems to have been due to August Edouart, a Frenchman, who, though only commencing the black portrait cutting after leaving his own country, used the French word for his craft instead of the black shade, which had hitherto been the name in England for such profile portraits.