“How many times,” writes Edouart, in the chapter in his treatise which he naïvely calls “The Grievances and Miseries of Artists,” “have I had people who, immediately after entering my room, departed, exclaiming, ‘Oh! they are all black shades,’ and would not stop to inspect them.”
“The name silhouette, which appeared in the newspaper advertisements, seems to have given them to understand that it was a new kind of likeness done in colours, each of which (full-length figure) they expected to get for five shillings.”
Again, on another page, he exclaims, “Why does such prejudice exist against black shades, which I call silhouette likenesses?” Certainly none of the early shadow portrait painters on paper, glass, or plaster ever used this name, taken from the French Finance Minister. It was not used in England until after the commencement of Edouart’s work and the publication of his book. By this time, it must be remembered, black profile portraiture had deteriorated in beauty, and the artists who frequented fairs and places of amusement were less skilled, indeed, than the Miers, Fields, Beethams, and Rosenbergs of the eighteenth century.
“Obliged to quit my country in consequence of a change in its Government,” Edouart, the most prolific and important of all the scissor-men, describes himself as “thrown upon foreign ground, without friends and without knowledge of the language. I had then very little money left, for I had lost all I possessed in the evacuation of Holland in 1813. A few months after my arrival in England, I found myself, after payment of all my travelling expenses, in possession of no more than a five-pound note, which I immediately expended in advertising myself as a French teacher.”
Succeeding in this at first, the arrival of so many other Frenchmen after a time reduced his work, and Edouart sought other means of livelihood. He began to make devices, landscapes, etc., with human hair, though what led him to this quaint handicraft, or what previous training he had in it, we have not been able to discover.
After receiving the patronage of Her Royal Highness the late Duchess of York, and making the portraits of some of her dogs with the animals’ own hair, he worked for the Queen and Princess Charlotte. Edouart, whose industry seems always to have been remarkable, executed over fifty of these strange hair portraits, and held an exhibition, the catalogue of which lies before us.
In 1825, Madame Edouart died, and August was persuaded to try his hand at likeness cutting in order to better the performance of some machine artist, whose work he had condemned. Finding, much to his surprise, that he was able to produce likenesses with extraordinary facility and exactness, he was persuaded by his friends to employ his time in this way, “so as to divert the gloom from my sinking mind, and alleviate my sorrows.” It seems probable also that his new talent was useful in filling his much depleted purse.
After many expressions of reluctance that he, August Edouart, should be cut by society and become a black profile taker, he decided to make an art of what had been so long considered a mere mechanical process, for Edouart never seems to have heard of black painted profiles and the exquisite work of the early profile painters, but only the machine-made pictures by the itinerant workers.
The first full-length that Edouart took was of the Bishop of Bangor, Dr. Magendie. “I succeeded so well,” he says in his introduction, “that I took all his lordship’s family; and so pleased were they that I made forty duplicates. This début, being so far above my expectation, encouraged me to continue, and from that time, being much engaged by the first visitors of Cheltenham, I took a resolution to keep a copy of every one to form a collection.”
“This talent,” he continues, “showed itself so strongly, and I was so anxious, that I worked from morning till night, and even in my dreams my brain was so much overheated by that anxiety, that in those dreams I was cutting likenesses of great personages, kings, queens, etc.”