There is a simplicity in the silhouette picture which brings it nearer to the Japanese print in its effect upon the mind than any other expression in art. All our attention is concentrated on outline, and in consequence there is a directness and vigour in the likeness which are lacking in more complex studies. Some Japanese artists, recognising this peculiar quality in the black profile portrait, supplement a conventionally drawn coloured portrait with a silhouette.

In Europe, during the last decade of the eighteenth century, the time was ripe for some popular outlet for the newly awakened interest in the old Greek classical method, for the recently excavated wonders revealed at Pæstum and Pompeii had appealed strongly to the popular taste, causing Greek purity of line and simplicity to dominate all ornament.

There was a natural rebound towards simplicity after the over-gorgeous detail in all domestic decoration under Le Roi Soleil, though exuberance survived for many years; the Greek influence may be traced from the latter half of the eighteenth century. Gradually the rococo absurdities disappeared; purity of line came back to architecture, and was manifested in furniture, in damask, brocade, and all ornamental expression, until at the beginning of the nineteenth century the mode in building design, decoration and dress was of the First Empire, and that is pure Greek.

The silhouette was another answer to the demand which gave us the reliefs after the antique which Flaxman and Josiah Wedgwood supplied.

At first these paper portraits must have seemed grotesquely cheap and ineffective to men to whom portraiture had hitherto meant a painting on canvas or panel, a delicate miniature, or an enamel of Limoges; but economy was in the air, the palmy days of reckless expenditure on personal matters by the few were over. Marie Antoinette was soon to wear India muslin instead of costly hand-made lace—very soon she might not even wear her own head; the gorgeously painted equipages of the Martin Brothers would give way to the less costly tumbrils. The days of fustian and the proletariat were coming; paper portraits instead of painting; then the apothecary picture-man, as Ruskin calls the photographer Daguerre.

The silhouette was the pioneer of cheap portraiture, which is now so great a factor in modern life. No wonder that, like all pioneers, the shadow portrait was made the butt of the wits.

Born in France, flourishing greatly in Germany, the silhouette soon reached England, and penetrated to the middle class, through the upper classes and court circles, the first English cut portrait that we can find record of being the cut silhouette of William and Mary in 1699. Then, while such men as Gonard were working in France, some of our best English exponents came to the fore. Miers, first of Leeds, then of London, painted generally in unrelieved black on plaster or ivory; John Field, his partner for thirty-five years, whose studio was thronged at 11, Strand, close to the old Northumberland House, which has now given way to Northumberland Avenue. Mrs. Beetham painted in shadowgraphy with exquisite skill, some of her jewel portraits rivalling the finest miniatures in quality. Charles, of 130, Strand, worked in Indian ink with pen on card, and produced such beautiful work that his trade description, “the first Profilist in England,” may well be excused.

It is interesting to note the very varied nomenclature of this art of black profile portraiture. H. Gibb and many others, besides Charles, call themselves Profilists.

Skiagraphy is used early.

The fashionable Shade is mentioned by half a dozen diarists and social writers of the eighteenth century, and was in more common use early in the nineteenth century. Horace Walpole gives us Découpure. Scissargraphist is used by Haines, of Brighton; in rural districts in Suffolk silhouettes are still called Scissartypes, quite regardless of whether the picture is of cut black paper or done with brush or pencil. Hubard, of Kensington and American fame, calls himself a Papyrologist, and his art that of Papyrolomia. In the Art Journal, 1853, p. 140, we read Papyrography is the title given to the art of cutting pictures in black paper.

Shadowgraphy was frequently used by the artists who took the portrait in shadow with or without the patent chair and wax candle so carefully described by Lavater, while some silhouettists are content to describe themselves as artists.

It was August Edouart, the Frenchman, who, wishing to emphasize the superiority of his methods over the machine-made shadows of his day, first used the words silhouette and silhouettist, or silhouetteur, in England. So great a novelty were these names that Edouart relates in his treatise how visitors constantly came to his salon to obtain the new silhouette portrait, and retired disappointed when they found it was only the familiar black shade which was offered to them.

Not only has there been much confusion in the popular mind with regard to the name of the silhouette, but also on account of the many different processes, and mixture of processes, used in their execution. Many silhouettists, as we have said, used several different ways of gaining the desired result. Mrs. Beetham, for example, painted exquisitely on ivory and plaster, with and without gold; she also cut out black paper, pasted it on card, and finished the edges with softening lines of paint on the background. This artist also painted on plaster and also on glass, so that very considerable study is required in order to judge unsigned examples.

Occasionally the whole process in silhouette cutting is reversed, and not only is a white paper portrait mounted on black, as in Mrs. Leigh Hunt’s silhouette of Byron, but the portrait is cut as a hole in a sheet of paper, and, on placing black paper, silk, or velvet at the back, the portrait outline is seen. The author owns an interesting silhouette locket in this manner, but examples are rare in England, though there are several at the Congressional Library at Washington.

Shadow portraits began to receive popular attention about 1770. At this date a picture was painted by J. C. Schenan (1740-1806), who also worked under the name of Johann Eleazar Zeisig.

The picture, which was extremely popular, was called “L’Origine de la peinture ou les portraits à la mode.” This showed a modern version of the old Greek legend. A lady, in a modish cap and deshabille, is having her shade outlined by a youth who holds a paper against the wall. This is the first hint at the movable picture which can be executed in one place and hung elsewhere; hitherto the wall or ground itself has been in place of the canvas. Two children are in the foreground, one holds up the cat while the other wields the pencil; another child makes a rabbit shadow with his fingers. Against the wall are many shadow pictures, all life-size, including one of a man, a dog, and a donkey. The dedication of the engraving of this picture runs thus: “Dediée à Son Altesse Serenissime Monseigneur le Prince Paladin du Rhin Duc regnant des Deux Ponts.”

A century before, Frances Chauveau engraved a picture by C. le Brunyn which shows the traces of a shadow portrait on the wall. The figures are in classical dress—the woman steadies her subject with one hand while she pencils the shadow with the other. A winged love superintends the process.

The popularity of such pictures was easily accounted for. Those whose accuracy of vision and skill of hand were insufficient to achieve the fashionable freehand scissor-work, saw in this tracing method an easy way of making the black profile portraits.

The tracing of shadow pictures was considered to be of Greek origin, and the enthusiasm for any art of Greek origin was assured, and the amateurs prospered.

The inevitable book of instruction for amateurs appeared in 1779 in Germany, “Directions for silhouette drawing, and the art of reducing them, together with an introduction dealing with their physiognomical use.” It must be remembered, in its early days silhouetting was supposed to be the handmaid of scientific research, and it was very many years before the artists in black portraiture threw off this pose in connection with their work. This book is published by Römhild, Leipzig.

Another little book of 258 pages, with eleven copper-plate illustrations, is now very rare, dated 1780; it was published by Philip Heinrich Perrenon, bookseller, of Münster. Rules are given, advice as to materials, the reduction of portraits, their finish, ornamentation, etc. Processes on glass, in relief, etc., are described.

Pantographs and other mechanical processes were invented, the names of such things varying from the high-sounding parallelogrammum delineatorium to the “monkey” indispensable for silhouette artists. Other books are described more fully in our chapters on the processes.

The silhouette mania affected the engravers of the day; black portraits in copper-plate appeared, and were used to illustrate histories and biographies. Also domestic scenes, with elaborate backgrounds, such as the death of the Empress Marie Theresa, which occurred in 1780. This was to be had of Loeschen Köhl, of Vienna, in the High Market, No. 488. It appeared in “An Almanack for the year 1786,” with fifty-three silhouettes, published by Loeschen Köhl.

Large engraved silhouette pictures also appeared, and were sold separately, such as the Festivity on the Prater. Another variety now in the Höhenzollern Museum in Berlin shows Friedrich Wilhelm II., with his wife, four sons, and three daughters, walking in a garden. This picture is painted on glass, and is mounted on a red ground. Later, August Edouart achieved elaborate pictures, such as a skirmish of cavalry or sports. His figures were entirely scissor-work—and extraordinarily clever. The black portraits were mounted on drawn or lithographed backgrounds.

Many English books of a biographical nature were entirely illustrated with portraits in silhouette, notably, “The Warrington Worthies,” by James Kendrick, M.D., published in 1854 by Longman Brown, London; “Hints, designed to promote Beneficence, Temperance, and Medical Science,” by J. C. Lettsom, published in 1801, by J. Mawman. In the second volume of this work there are nine fine silhouette portraits.

In the memoir of Hannah Kilham, by her daughter-in-law, published by Darton Harvey, London, 1837, there is a beautiful silhouette portrait. Field, of the firm of Miers & Field, notifies on his trade label that he cuts silhouettes suitable for “frontispieces in literary work.”

In the porcelain factories of England and Germany silhouette pictures were used for the ornamentation of gift-pieces, and also for souvenir examples. In connection with such factories we may mention that a cup was made on which Dr. Wall, of Worcester fame, is painted in silhouette, and at the museum belonging to the Meissen factory, sixteen miles from Dresden, there is a portrait of Johannis Joachim Kändler, born 1706, King’s Court Commissioner and model master at the Royal porcelain factory. Rare and interesting specimens of silhouette porcelain are dealt with in a separate chapter. In glass, too, silhouette portraits were etched in gold leaf and in black on glass, which was then enclosed in another transparent layer of glass for protection.

The taste for the silhouette spread its glamour over many arts; it became vitiated on account of unskilled and inartistic work, and may be said to have fallen into disrepute in the early days of Queen Victoria.

It was then that the art of Miers and Field, Gibb and Charles, fell into the hands of unworthy exponents, whose works partake of the ineptitude of so much of the early Victorian art. There are silhouette portraits of the second quarter of the nineteenth century and later, which are amusing because of their vitality, interesting because of the people whom they portray, or because of a quaint bygone fashion; but with the exception of the work of Edouart, which stands alone on account of its superb technique, they are as a rule no longer examples which connoisseurs sincerely admire for their beauty. On the production of the real treasures of black portraiture the curtain was rung down about 1850. At that date the pageant of shadow pictures since the days of black outline on Etruscan vases ceased to be hauntingly beautiful, mystic, alluring; its subtle appeal was over.