Figures in black profile join hands round the wine-cups and oil-jars made by Etruscan potters; in silhouette men are armed to battle, women weave cloth and grind corn, children play at ball and knuckle-bones, life-like in shadow.

There is a pageant of profile portraiture on the mummy cases and frescoed tombs of ancient Egypt. Strange peoples are shown in outline as they lived; they go to war, they marry, their children play, the ritual of their Book of the Dead is pictured in profile three thousand years before the Christian era.

These flat and unsubstantial ghost figures come to us down the ages. From those mystic times when Crates of Sicyon, Philocles of Egypt, and Cleanthes of Corinth first worked in monochrome, there is an unbroken tale of men and women who have lived, loved, hated, and triumphed—Pharaohs and their slaves, Greek gods, and athletes; a French king, a murdered queen; Napoleon and his generals; statesmen and politicians; Goëthe, Beethoven, Burns, Wellington, Dickens, Washington, Harrison, Scott, and ten thousand others down to the present day. They come as colourless ghosts, relics of bygone men and women, shadows caught and held, while the realities have flitted across life’s stage and vanished.

Old Omar Khayâm, “King of the Wise,” in the twelfth century knew

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—

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.

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.:—

Now, Swift died in 1745, and may be said to have died to literature some years earlier. Silhouette’s cheese-paring economy was, we are told, induced by the deficit entailed “by the ruinous war of 1756,” consequently it could not have been before 1760 that his name would have become synonymous with cheapness. We thus have evidence that the art was in use at the least twenty years before his name could have been applied to it; and it does not at all appear that it was new then, as Mrs. Pyburg cut William and Mary’s portrait out of black paper in 1699. This nomenclature must, therefore, have been caused by his adoption of it as a pastime, and not by the reason given by I. D’Israeli and the Dict. Hist. This is an instance of how easily false derivations may be published even within so short a time of the events for which they profess to account.

A very slight study of silhouettes shows how characteristic is the pose of many of the old black profile portraits. In the shadow of George III., do we not see the embodiment of Lord Rosebery’s inimitable description, “the German Princelet of his day,” and in Pitt’s silhouette, with its “damned long, obstinate upper lip,” as his royal master so vigorously described it, there is the very ego of the man who was premier at twenty-five.

Goëthe’s letters to his mother are full of allusions to the novel portraiture which had been brought to his notice by Lavater, the Zürich divine, whose essay on Physiognomy, written for the promotion of the knowledge and love of mankind, is still read in Germany. The edition of 1794 is before us, and shows hundreds of silhouette drawings, for he wrote of the importance of reading character from people’s faces, and used the silhouette for this purpose. Thus the shadow portrait, once the amusement of amateurs, now began to have scientific significance.

Goëthe testifies that Lavater wished all the world to co-operate with him, and he arrived at Goëthe’s house on June 23rd, 1774, not only to take portraits of the young genius, but also of his parents. A year later Goëthe implores Lavater in a letter, “I beg you will destroy the family picture of us; it is frightful. You do credit neither to yourself nor us. Get my father’s cut out and use him as a vignette, for he is good. You can do what you like with my head too, but my mother must not stand there like that!”

An amusing sequel to this is that when, in the third volume of the “Physiognomy,” the councillor’s portrait appeared, but not that of Goëthe’s mother, she was much annoyed, and said that Lavater evidently did not think her face worthy to appear. The matter rankled, for in 1807 she had her head examined by Dr. Gall, “to find out if the great qualities of her son had, by any chance, been passed on to her.”

This much discussed silhouette of Goëthe’s mother is illustrated in “Goëthe’s Mother,” by Dr. Karl Heinemann, and fuller accounts of the poet’s attitude towards the silhouettists of his day, and the instructive and exciting deductions from their work, will be found further on in our volume.

In a letter from Fräulein von Göchhausen to Frau Rath—we use the translation of Mr. A. S. Gibb—the delight in the novel portraiture is shown, and incidentally the vivacity of the writer:—

Later the craft of the silhouettist fell into disrepute when it had become part of the curriculum of young ladies’ schools; unskilful artists itinerated, pursuing their craft in booths and at fairs—one in the Thames Tunnel, several on the Chain Pier at Brighton. At street corners magic figures, with concealed workers, were used to entice the unwilling with mystery. Even Sam Weller, in his inimitable letter to Mary, laughs at the methods of the “profeel macheen.”

Such is the story, in brief, of the silhouette. Sometimes we see in it a little social document, elevated by fortuitous circumstances or scarcity of other pictorial record to historical value. As in the case of Robert Burns’s portrait, by J. Miers, and that of his brother, Gilbert Burns, by Howie, in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, at all times it is passively charming. Surely we need not scorn this step-sister of photography—this poor relation of the art world. In the words of Seraphim, when, in 1771, he flung wide the doors of his Shadow Theatre at Versailles—