Surely it is high time the art of black profile portraiture had a historian of its own and the great masters of silhouette portraiture were rescued from oblivion. Shadows are impalpable things which fade away almost before we are aware of their existence.
Year by year accident and the ravages of time lessen the number of these fragile curios; the beautiful portraits on ivory and glass, being the most fragile, are the first to go. Already it is not easy to find good examples in their original frames complete with convex glass and trade label of the artist pasted on the back. Mutilated examples with cracked wax filling or plaster paintings, chipped and incomplete, are still to be found; but even these have often been reframed, or have been broken open to renew glass or back, and so the trade label has been lost. The searcher who hopes to be successful in his quest has now to go very far afield, unless he be satisfied with the paper pictures of indifferent quality, interesting perhaps on account of the identity of the sitter or the fame of the cutter, but very far from equalling in beauty the best work of the masters in black profile portraiture. Some enthusiasts maintain that the least artistic profile shadow portrait has a curious individuality which redeems it from overwhelming ugliness; certainly the infinite variety of the processes and the fresh and vigorous outlines in unexpected media give a charm to the portrait in monochrome.
There is no sequence in the production of the different types. Some of the earliest specimens were cut in paper, for Mrs. Pyburg is said to have cut out the portraits of William and Mary in 1699; and certainly some of the beauties of Versailles were cut by Gonard in paper; the mid-Victorians worked in paper, and there are still a few cutters busy with their scissors. Glass, ivory, and plaster, oil-painting, smoke-staining, and Indian ink, all were used one by one or together. There is no evolution and gradual development to trace in the art and craft of the silhouettist; the pictures come before us like the shadows that they are, each process appearing and disappearing. Sometimes the same man worked in half a dozen different processes, using now one and now another, according to the taste or purse of the sitter, or guided by his own judgment as to the suitability of his subject for this or that medium of expression. The miniature shades for mounting in rings, brooches, scarf-pins, and pendants were not done exclusively by a few men, as one might surmise from their rarity; they were painted with the delicacy of a miniaturist by many of the silhouettists, who usually painted silhouettes of ordinary size. These jewel shadows are now very difficult to find, and it is probable no such collection as that of the late Mr. Montague Guest will ever come into the market again.
Into the lives of great personages, such as Goëthe, Napoleon, our English kings, queens, and princesses, the silhouette creeps with colourless persistence; there is no escaping it. Goëthe writes letters to his mother, and to Lavater, being touched with enthusiasm for the silhouette and its uses by the zealous Zürich minister. The poet cut a few himself. Napoleon presents glass profile portraits of himself in black on gold tinsel ground to his generals. Princess Elizabeth, daughter of George III., is a famous scissor-woman, and many are the pictures she cut, not only of her father, mother, and sisters, but also of trees, birds and flowers, rural scenes, cupids, and cupid groups.
Fanny Burney delights in the black portraits; all the Burney family are grouped together. She records her visits to the silhouettist Charles, when her attendance on the Queen as Maid of Honour was over. This portrait shows the famous creator of “Evelina” to be sprightly indeed; her delicate profile is well set off with curled and powdered hair, lace ruffle, and beribboned hat, whose tilt must surely have been learnt at Versailles.
Pepys lived too early to have his shadow taken. We feel sure the old coxcomb would have had a dozen of himself, mighty fine in new clothes, and perchance, if in generous mood, a single one of his wife in her old ones. [My father’s profile, cut in paper, is spoken of by Bulwer Lytton in “The Caxtons,” in the second volume.]
Horace Walpole, in his letter to Sir Horace Mann, written in 1761, desires him to thank the Duchess of Grafton on his behalf for the découpure of herself, this being, he explains in a note, “her figure cut out in card by M. Herbert, of Geneva, who was famous in that art.” This allusion at this early date again indicates that the cut silhouette was the earliest, as it certainly is the last survival, of the art. The scissor-type, it is still called by the old inhabitants of Suffolk, who well remember the visits of the itinerant artists.
Strange confusion has arisen in the minds of many admirers of silhouettes on account of the name. Black profile portraiture was practised long before Etienne de Silhouette economised in the public finance department of Louis XV., and the wits of the day nicknamed “silhouette” whatever was cheap and common.
In Swift’s “Miscellanies,” ed. 1745, vol. x., page 204, is a whole series of poems (full of the most eccentric rhymes) on silhouette portraits, e.g.:—