He had not been busied with winning knowledge without seeing the deep significance of the shadow portrait. The familiar figure of the showman whose lantern displays the black moving figures in the midnight streets of Teheran appealed to him with vital force. He uses the shadow picture constantly as a simile in his matchless quatrains—
“Heav’n but the vision of fulfilled desire,
And hell the shadow from a soul on fire,
Cast on the darkness into which ourselves
So late emerged from, shall so soon expire.”
The subtle appeal of the silhouette is inevitably associated with death, in its legendary origin. Filled with joyous anticipation, thrilling with the thought of the woman he would soon hold in his arms, a lover returned after a short absence to find that his betrothed was dead; he rushed into the death chamber, maddened with grief, to look his last on the face of his beloved before it should be hidden from him for ever. There on the wall the shadow of the dead woman’s features appeared in perfect outline, for a taper at the head of the bier cast the shadow. With reverent hand the man traced the portrait, which he believed to have been specially sent as consolation.
There are other variants of the story. The Greek legend attributes the invention of painting to the daughter of Dibutades. Knowing that the passion of her lover was waning, she furtively sketched his shadow on the wall as he stood with the sun behind him. We are not told if this delicate way of indicating that even a shadow outline can be made permanent by a sufficiently determined young woman was of any use in making the love of the inconstant swain indelible.
Many artists have illustrated different phases of the basic idea as to the shadow having first suggested portraiture. Le Brunyn, Schenan, B. West, R.A., and Mulready are some of them.
We make no apology for studying the history of this art of the silhouettist in its latter-day manifestations. At its best, black profile portraiture is a thing of real beauty, almost worthy to take its place with the best miniature painting; at its worst, it is a quaintly appealing handicraft, revealing the fashions and foibles, the intimate domestic life and conventions of its day. It was executed by so many distinguished amateurs, from Etienne de Silhouette himself to Queen Charlotte and Princess Elizabeth of England, that few social histories or collections of letters of the eighteenth century fail to show how its strange chequer fitted into the fashionable life of the period.