Full text of "The art of the silhouette"

See other formats

wmmmmmmmmmmmmtm

THE ART OF
SILHOUETTE

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2007 with funding from

IVIicrosoft Corporation

http://www.archive.org/details/artofsilhouetteOOcokerich

THE MUSICIAN : By EDOUART.

(In the possession of A. B. Connor, Esq.)

THE AET OF
SILHOUETTE

BY DESMOND COKE

LONDON : MARTIN SECKER

NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI

ST THE SAME AUTHOR \\^ ^

HELENA BRETT'S CAREER \^ /^ Vi9
THE BENDING OF A TWIG \J

First published 1918

PKINTBD AT

THE BALLANTYNE PRKSi

LONDON

IN LOVE
TO MY MOTHER
WHO GAVE ME— AMONG MUCH ELSE-
THE FIERCE JOY OF COLLECTING

" Vn mime penchant nous unit "

751719

BY THE SAME AUTHOR \\^ ^ |

HELENA BRETT'S CAREER \^ /* l^
THE BENDING OF A TWIG \J

Pint pvMished 191S

PRINTED AT

THE BALLAXTYNE FSKSt

LONDON

IN LOVE
TO MY MOTHER
WHO GAVE ME— AMONG MUCH ELSE-
THE FIERCE JOY OF COLLECTING

" Un mSme penchant nous unit "

751719

CONTENTS

FAQI

WARNINGS — AND ADVERTISEMENT 11

I. IN PRAISE OF COLLECTING 17

II. A DEFENCE OF SHADOWS 29

III. THE MEN BEHIND THE SHEET 41

IV. DECADENCE 71
V. EDOUART 97

VI. CUPID AND SILHOUETTE 121

VII. LABELS 135

VIII. SOME COLLECTIONS 159

IX. " CUT PAPER " 181

X. PRACTICAL 205

XI. NOW — AND WHAT THEN ? 217

INDEX

PLATES

Paeing p.
I. The Musician, by Edouart Frontispiece

II. A Lady, by Charles 22

III. Two Beaux, by Charles and Miers 24

IV. The Austere Art of Silhouette 80

V. The Soft Charm of Silhouette 86
VI. Two Ladies, by Mrs. Beetham 48

VII. A Lady, by Mrs. Beetham 50

VIII. A Pair, by Rosenberg 54

IX. Silhouette in Red, by Spornberg 58

X. A Lady, by Miers, Leeds 62

XL Silhouette Jewels 66

XII. A Royal Pair, assigned to Charles 72

XIII. Gold-tinted Silhouette, by Herve 76

XIV. The Girl with the Bonnet, by Frith 78
XV. Two Young Bucks, by Hubard and Gapp 80

XVI. The Sisters, by Beaumont 84

XVII. A Victorian Young Lady 90

XVIII. An Undergraduate, by Edouart 98

XIX. A Famous Actor, by Edouart 102

XX. A Family, by Edouart 108

XXI. A Group, by Torond 112

XXII. A Silhouette Hand Screen 114

PLATES

Pacing p.

XXIII. A Page from Edouart's FoUos 118

XXIV. A Family, by Adolphe 122
XXV. A Group, by Laura Mackenzie 128

XXVI. A Lady, by Mrs. Beetham 136

XXVII. Framed Miniatures, by Miers and Beetham 142

XXVIII. A Family, assigned to Field 146

XXIX. The Spinet-Player, by Torond 148

XXX. A Pope and a Soldier, by Foster 160

XXXI. William Pitt, by Fepk 166

XXXII. A Red-Coat Officer 170

XXXIII. A Calligraphic Silhouette 174

XXXIV. A Negative Silhouette 176
XXXV. A Memorial Design 182

XXXVI. Heraldic Emblem 188

XXXVII. The White Houses 192

XXXVIII. The Angler's Repast 200

XXXIX. An Officer, by H. P. Roberts 210

XL. A Modern Specimen, by Phil May 218

XLI. Cuttings by Hubard and Edouart 222

WARNINGS— AND ADVERTISEMENT

This is a book, not a tome. ; '- . . ...

It is intended, not for historians, antiqaaiies,
experts, or curators : but rather for collectors,
artists, lovers of the past, general readers, and all
who think nothing human or curious alien from
themselves.

It is not a History of Silhouette. A work properly
so named has lately been produced by Mrs. Nevill
Jackson, who has traced her subject with scholarly
completeness, fully analyzed the various processes,
and added an exhaustive alphabetic list of all known
profilists, however humble.

This is a lighter book, which dares to think that
silhouettes are not a very solemn subject, albeit
once referred to by a back-street dealer as '*them
funeral things." The pleasures of collecting, what
one can still find well worth collecting, the best-
known profilists who worked in England, their curious
labels, the bond of Love with Silhouette all down
the ages, some vindication of a gentle art too long

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

misunderstood — ^these form only a few ingredients
in the salad of my book.

There will be no pompous, satisfying " we " ;
no ancient tales of so-called silhouettes upon Etruscan
Vases, ; familiar in a dozen articles from magazines,
..nor. much (I. hope) on Etienne de Silhouette ; and I
' shall' ildt pursue my subject through France, Germany,
and Russia to the pale-eyed East. In spite of this
I trust that there is not a little information boiled down
from my note-books for these pages. I have not
wantonly let anything of interest slip.

In any case, however others like it, I have written
this book from a real love of my subject and have
loved writing it. Foiu"teen years have passed since,
a Freshman of Oxford, I fared out into the High
Street and, feeling somewhat reckless, paid eighteen-
pence for two full-length profiles by Edouart. . . .
I have been buying ever since, although alas I at
annually increasing prices. These essays therefore
represent the fom'teen-year experience of a mono-
maniac who claims to be among the earliest of his
peculiar brand.

There are mistakes of course. As to this I can
only say that gratitude shall leaven the grief with
which I receive corrections.

WARNINGS

It is futile, no less than ungracious, for second-
comers to depreciate the pioneers, nor am I likely
to wrong in such a way my good friend Mrs. Nevill
Jackson, who has done everything within her power
to help me in the chapter upon Edouart. It is
in justice only to myself, should any critic find the
same passages quoted in us both, that I here say
the notes on which this book is based were largely
made before the " History " was published or indeed
begun. Any resemblance is therefore due to a mere
common source. I have read Mxs. Jackson's book
with interest and profit, then put it aside and tried
to see how differently I could write my own. There
is enough in Silhouette to fill a dozen volumes (I
have touched only on the profilists who worked in
England), and I hope these two first may be regarded
as supplementary to one another.

As to the pictures, it is neither pardonable love
nor yet a sinful pride which has ordained that they
•hould largely be from specimens in my possession ;
but mere utility. Had my aim been to fill these pages
with The Best Silhouettes, I should have canvassed
all collectors for their specimens by Miers, Charles,
and Mrs. Beetham. It seemed, however, much
more useful to show, instead, each of the many

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

methods used and at the least one silhouette by all
of the most famous artists : a guide by which owners
might set a name to their pet specimens. This I have
kept before me in my buyings and my sellings (for
the collector must do both), so that I believe the
specimens here reproduced give a fair idea of each
profilist at his best and most typical. That is, at
least, their aim.

Enough ! One word, brief but no less sincere, of
thanks must first be given to Mrs. Nevill Jackson,
the Lady Sackville, and Mr. Francis Wellesley for
their generous help, as also to all the collectors
whose names will be found in these pages. Then,
ignoring the contempt of those superior people
mentioned in my second line, and with one last kindly
warning to all who think that such a book as this
should hold a purple patch or two on dainty Lady
Betty, with the word " vastly " as refrain, let us
take unashamed our pleasure in the old-world puppet
show and, leaving cleverness to others, chat easily
about the shadows that we love.

IN PRAISE OF
COLLECTING

CHAPTER I

IN PRAISE OF COLLECTING

The collector is usually thought a crank by his
acquaintance, a nuisance by his friends, a miser by
his relatives, a blessing by the dealers, and a deluded
idiot by every one concerned. He is, as a matter
of fact, the happiest — if the poorest — of God's
creatures. He is the poorest, because if some
miraculous twist of the wheel made him a millionaire
to-morrow, he would merely collect white elephants
instead of silhouettes and never have the cash to pay
for all of them. . . . But he is the happiest, because
he is obeying Nature's law.

The wise Aristotle, in beginning his great work
upon the Life Political, laid it down that Man is a
social creature, but forgot to state that he is also
a collecting animal. From the earliest dawn of history
and long before it, he has obeyed one instinct, the
instinct to amass. The cave man, as we know,
collected flints (I hope my history is right) — or wives.
Adam probably came home, some days, delighted

17 B

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

with a specially fine fig-leaf. Eve possibly collected
apples, which would explain a lot. Drive out Nature
with a pitchfork, said the Roman poet, she will
hurry back. You cannot stop Man from collecting.
All the world seeks something : curios, stamps,
sovereigns, or adventures. The man-made law has
ruled out scalps and wives, but other things remain.
As long as it allows the curio-shops to open even
five and a half days out of the seven, so long will Man
find a way to gratify the universal instinct.

What lies beneath it ? Dangerous to ask, of
anything ; but I expect it has been long ago established
that the collecting mania, like any form of sport,
is based deep down upon a natural vanity. The
cricketer thrusts forward fitness as his god, the
connoisseur declares that he walks fifteen miles a
day and walking is the real way to get fit : but one
in his own hidden soul takes pride to hit a ball when
others would have missed, a second is delighted to
detect a forgery or recognize from well across a road
the shops where they are always selling off, with an
all -day electric light casting its glamour on their
** antique " jewels.

Equally Man needs excitement ; an old truth which
explains things so diverse as football, juvenile crime,

IN PRAISE OF COLLECTING

and collecting. Life, left to itself, sends along its
thrills too slowly ; but the collector, if always
destitute of funds, never can lack expectation. Each
day he fares out along the shops (for he will drift to
London and soon learn half a hundred different
productive routes), sure every day that fate will
send him one of those historic finds that stand like
milestones in the History of Art : a crystal ewer sold
as glass or at the least a Raeburn for five shillings.
And when instead he only finds a print or silhouette
at probably one-quarter of the West-end price, with
what joy does he bear it back — collectors are the
only men who carry parcels along Piccadilly ; — with
what excited hands unwrap it, safely home ; with
what delirious haste find a small space for it upon
his crowded walls ; how often leave his work and
ramble absently, to find himself before his latest
treasure ! Each day is too short for him. He is
never lonely, and can not be bored. He is the
favourite of fortune.

I have known people who collected spurs, corks,
potted-meat lids, bobbins, pistols, playbills, labels
from decanters, imperfect books, siege money,
peasants' rings, insurance plates, illustrated music
covers, suppressed plates, forgeries, masonic emblems,

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

knockers, buttons, shoes, and Indian basketry. I
have heard of a man who collected visiting cards, with
the tiny pasteboard of Tom Thumb as his especial
gem ; another who spent his lifetime seeking the
twelfth Delft plate to complete his set, and found
the owner of it finally to be a man whose sole remark
was, " How much do you want for your eleven ? " . .
and I have read about another rich collector, who
bought single copies of fu-st-edition Dickens' till he
had got a set, when he sold, caring little what they
fetched, and so began his blissful hunt again. All
these men, pitied by their friends, were happy, for
they had found an interest in life and rose each
day with a new hope. Health, business, family —
the world in these ways might be terribly unkind ;
but who could ever tell ? Perhaps that very after-
noon fortune would throw across their path the
perfect potted-meat lid or the ideal bobbin ! And
life becomes a splendour to the man who has eternal
hope for even a small thing.

At first, of course, one buys at random anything.
This seems cheap, that is early, the other is only a
very little cracked. . . . Later, however, one begins
to realize two facts. Only a billionaire could hope
to make a good collection of everything antique,

IN PRAISE OF COLLECTING

and the man who wishes bargains must know more
than any given dealer. Hence grows that modern
malady, specialization ; for each collector wishes in
the end to be the owner of a great collection, and
not too far below the surface of all Britons there is
lurking Shylock. The young collector sells his early
purchases, burns the forgeries that are his con-
noisseur wild oats, and fixes on a subject.

And yet — and yet who can resist a bargain ? The
medley on my walls accuses me, though long enough
ago I vowed to specialize in Silhouette.

Certainly the man who keep himself for even a
few years to one particular collection — reading
articles upon it, asking prices, seeing the specimens
of others, above all constantly upon the hunt — ^has
his reward as slowly he begins to realize that dealers
are curiously ignorant. That is how the truth
comes home at first, for he does not reflect that the
poor dealer must know something about everything,
whilst he — he has specialized and, never knowing it,
he has become an expert !

Perhaps this narrow way rules out those big
adventures at which I have hinted, but who shall
say that humble connoisseurs are not rewarded with
their little thrills ? yes, and their little tragedies.

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

Oddly enough, the name of Charles brings back an
episode in either kind from my adventures in the
strait field of Silhouette.

The first at Oxford, a dozen years ago. The back-
street dealer, selling me a fine brass oval frame for
a few shillings, rubs the grimy surface of its glass
with finger scarcely whiter and remarks : " There's
something in it, too, sir. It's dirt cheap at that."
Imagine if, still full of youth's romance, I snatched it
eagerly out of his hands, refused all wrapping, and
hugged the new find with especial fervour as I rushed
straight back to my College rooms. Even so soon,
I knew that graceful oval beaten out of brass as the
most early sort of Silhouette frame. . . . And when,
sacrificing a new handkerchief, I cleaned the dirt of
ages from its glass, there lay beneath it the superb
example of Charles' 'genius which graces plate ii o|
the present volume !

Sometimes I amuse myself, in abstract mood, with
the debate : should I have retm'ned it to the dealer,
had he not obviously sold the picture also by his
last remark? Ruskin, I think, somewhere has de-
bated a like question, but I forget his answer. Mine
generally is. No. The dealer takes his chance: the
buyer is allowed his luck. Knowledge ought to be

PAINTED IN BLACK & GREY ON CARD
By Charles.

IN PRAISE OF COLLECTING

its own reward. Nor would any conscience money taken
to a dealer reach the poor owner who sold it to him.
The other episode bound up with this graceful
painter of the shadow portrait has only half a
happy ending. The scene a Sussex farm ; the
period, lately. Upon one side of a dresser the
delightful portrait seen upon plate iii ; upon
the other a similar wood oval frame, a like
decorated glass, but void of silhouette. Tommy
(I feel sure that would be his name), " a most mis-
chievous boy," one day some years ago had come
into the parlour and " rubbed the likeness off." . . .
With misdirected gallantry he had begun upon the
lady. Looking at the beau, imagine the belle's
languor, her banked hair, her dainty laces, the tilt of
her proud chin but the redeeming softness of her
smile ! Oh, Tommy, Tommy, where, I often wonder,
are you now ? Are you perhaps an artist, penitent ?
or more deservedly in Wormwood Scrubs ? . . .
Perhaps it may console all but the kid-glove senti-
mentalists to learn that Tommy, Embarking on the
last half of his work, was found and given a good
caning. The other frame is not in my collection. It
would have been too grim, like the chair empty at a
Christmas feast.

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

It is a popular fallacy that the collector must be
a rich man. As a matter of contrary fact, it has been
shown already that if he is worth his salt, he never
has a penny ! But sophistry apart, the real collector
has no need for any special income. He spends no
more upon his hobby than other men on theirs,
whether they be horses, wine, or taxis. He simply
must adjust the choice of subject to his means. You
can't be too poor to collect ; you easily may be too
rich. What fun in collecting if once you can afford
to buy in the most costly market ; if once the thrill
of a find vanishes, the dare-devil sensation of I
Oughtn't But I Must ? No, what the ideal collector
needs is knowledge ; knowledge and a little pluck.
He must not lean on signatures or pedigrees, for
these are what cost money. He must discover for
himself and not pay bigger prices for another's finds.
He must shake free from the worship of names, and
mistrust all that is written on a work of art — except
in the technique itself, for every one with eyes to
read. Lastly, he must perhaps " be not the first by
whom the new is tried," for nobody may follow, but
even less "the last to lay the old aside." Like a
cimning journalist, he must read signs and portents
in the public taste, buying not what every one is

TWO BEAUX
Painted (1) on glass by Charles, and (2) on chalk by Miers, London.

iii

IN PRAISE OF COLLECTING

buying (this is where he must sell, if he has got no
sentiment, the lucky fellow) but what he sees is
slowly growing possible as a boom in the years to
come. Thus he will find a mart not too overcrowded ;
pass many happy days in rambles lit by an undying
hope ; make endless friendships linked in a free-
masonry that possibly no other can surpass ; solace
his old age, when sport or love and other hobbies die,
with all the indexings that he had always meant to
do ; plan, during his last illness, how to rearrange
the room once more ; and finally, from a more restful
plane, look down upon the sale, glorying in each
big bid for objects he had bought so cheaply but
with such a pride ; and possibly rejoice to find his
stodgy modern-boudoir relatives suddenly aware,
as bid comes swift on bid, that he was no selfish
idiot, after all, but something curiously like the
saviour of his family !

Indeed, without diverging to another kind of shade
from that of which this book will treat, who possibly
can doubt but what the gentle spirits of the dear
women who worked their love into a sampler, or
found some consolation for life's hardship in an
allegorical cut -paper, look down with an especial
love on such as house their careful labours ? Every

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

occultist must be a collector, for what more certain
way to the goodwill of those who have passed by
than through the care and treasuring of treasures
that they loved so dearly ?

A DEFENCE
OF SHADOWS

CHAPTER II

A DEFENCE OF SHADOWS

Collectors in general, notwithstanding all of the
above, have always been a race for whom there is
reserved a special brand of genial enough pity, as
for lunatics essentially harmless ; and Silhouette
in particular has exacted martyrdom in all ages of its
devotees, as witness the tragic episode of Edouart
set forth upon a later page.

Thus I do not complain when, asked at a dinner-
party what I specially collect, my answer draws the
comment : " Oh, how interesting, yes ! / know.
Those little cut-out things. They did them on the
piers." ... I do not complain of this. I am long
hardened. But it inspired this chapter.

The first thing to be said is that a silhouette is
not, as many imagine, any form of a daguerreotype.
The silhouette-collector's scorn for this last pro-
duction is kin to that of the old-master expert for a
silhouette. We can never understand at all each
other's vices I

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

The next thing to be said, and later to be proved,
is that it is not necessarily cut from paper. True,
some of the earliest profiles were so produced ; true,
many artists give most praise to those severe black
heads with their fully adequate austerity (plate iv) ;
but connoisseurs have long ago agreed that Miers,
Mrs. Beetham, Rosenberg, and Charles are a quartette
supreme in that hey-day of silhouette, the eighteenth
century. Now all these, it will presently be shown,
painted their portraits, whether on card, glass or
plaster, and (save for such variations from type as
three early-cut Beethams I have recently unearthed)
never relapsed on the cut -paper method, which they
doubtless loftily despised.

The best silhouettists never touched a pair of scissors.

There ! I have set it on a line apart, and in italics
like a sprial's climax. Were I but Sterne, or did I
live in a day when publishers were tame, it should
be on a page apart, with vast black lines around
and red hands pointing index fingers at the little
central lump of type. For there lies Silhouette's
whole vindication, and through the ignorance of
it have many insults long been piled upon a very
charming, nor too easy, art.

These old-time profiles, miniature paintings not

THE AUSTERE ART OF SILHOUETTE

(1) Cut by Mrs. Beetham. (2) Mrs. John Lewes.
(3) "Shelley." (4) Hollow-cut silhouette.

A DEFENCE OF SHADOWS

a half-crown cut-out, were not taken — equally —
on piers. The galleries of the great profilists were
cheek by jowl with the great artists* studios, at
quite impeccable addresses, nor did a lower class by
any means consort to them. Frankly in snobbish
vein, since men will do much for their enthusiasms,
I set down at random a list of great folk who have
not despised to hold traffic with the profilist. First
of all, George III, who seems to have spent half his
reign posed against white screens ; Queen Charlotte,
naturally involved with him, though she was also a
collector on her own account ; Princess Elizabeth,
their child, herself a profilist of merit ; Mrs. Delaney,
of course ; Mrs. Fitzherbert, with her own private
gallery ; Perdita Robinson, faithless for a moment
to the painters; George IV, to whom G. Atkinson
of Brighton boasts to be *' sole profilist " ; William
IV and even Queen Victoria, who sat to Master
Hubard ; Napoleon, giving profiles — it is said —
as souvenirs; Nelson (but beware of forgers); Pitt,
more than once, and Fox ; Goethe, who loved the
art and practised it no less, as perfect specimens on
Mr. Wellesley's wall attest ; Gibbon, protruberant
with snuff-box, for a frontispiece ; Goldsmith (now
in the National Portrait Gallery) ; Mrs. Leigh Hunt,

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

herself a cutter of great merit, as shown by portraits
of Byron and Keats ; Sir Walter Scott, who sat to
Edouart at Edinburgh in 1831 ; Paganini, by the
same, as also the exiled Charles X, who sat to him at
Holyrood ; or later still, Browning by Master Hubard
— ^these with Wellington, Fanny Burney, Burns (who
sat to Miers : see the Clarinda Correspondence,
January and February 1788), the Pompadour, and
countless duchesses must surely touch the souls of
such as think nothing of an art till it is patronized
by the nobility.

Or if there be those, and certainly there are, who
value works of art by nothing but the prices paid,
they may thrust from their mind the vision of a full-
length portrait cut in black and framed complete
for half a crown, if they will concentrate on dainty
and expensive . . . miniatures superbly painted under
a fine glass of gold and white ; glorious specimens of
black and gold on glass ; priceless china, brooches,
jewelled rings ; or — ^gem of Mrs. Nevill Jackson's
beautiful collection — an ivory patch-box, gold-
mounted and with two panels of superb enamel
flanking a wee portrait signed by Miers. None of
these things cost little when first made, and they
have not gone down in value.

A DEFENCE OF SHADOWS

Again, for each man has his own peculiar god,
if it be that authority is needed, let it here be said
that the galleries and museums, tardily awakened,
are buying specimens at last, whilst the Victoria
and Albert has lately given space to a fine loan
collection.

But those who have once learnt the charm of this
ancient and delightful art will seek for a more pleasant
sanction. They may find it in a German author of
1780, quoted in a twenty-year-old article by Andrew
Tuer, who probably can claim to be the pioneer in
Silhouette's revival so far as penmen go. " This
art," writes this ingenious German, " is older than any
other. In Arcadie itself profiles were drawn. The
shepherds of that golden age, in their happy simplicity,
traced shadows of their beloved on the sand — ^to
worship in absence. ..." And later he says, though
less nicely : " But now again, since this new culture,
profiles are asked for since they give a truer idea
of the face than the daubs of the ignorant. The
taste of Man has revolted against Affectation and
gone back to the Simple."

The new culture was of course Lavater's science,
physiognomy, and Lavater himself is no less glowing
in his praise of profiles. " What more imperfect,"

33 c

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

he exclaims, *' than a portrait of the human figure
drawn after the shade ! And yet what truth does not
this portrait possess ! This spring, so scanty, is for
that reason the more pure. - . ." Lavater builds
his whole system largely upon silhouettes, of which in
the quarto edition he gives some beautiful examples,
and not content with this, hints at "a separate
Work " wherein to treat of their significance more
fully. " He that despises shades," says he, " despises
physiognomy ; " or, in more ecstatic vein, he refers
to Silhouette as "Little gold but the purest," a
slender art but eloquent.

Ruskin, another giant for such as worship names
(I slowly spread my net, unseen), says in Prceterita :
" I had always been content enough with my front
face in the glass, and had never thought of con-
triving vision of the profile. The cameo finished I
saw at a glance to be well cut, but the image it
gave of me was not to my mind. I did not analyze
its elements at the time, but should now describe
it as a George the Third's penny, with a halfpenny-
worth of George the Fourth, the pride of Amurath
the Fifth, and the temper of eight little Lucifers in
a swept-lodging."

This confession from a connoisseur of beauty

A DEFENCE OF SHADOWS

does much to justify Lavater in his praise of
shadows.

The fact is that we moderns, always excepting
those who join the theatrical profession, have come
to dread the sight of our own profiles. We are like
Ruskin, *' content enough " with our front face, and
it is this view that the photographer decides to take
after a swift tactful side-glance at our chins and
noses. In the days before it was considered dowdy
for a woman to show more than her lips from under-
neath her hat, in the good old days when languid
beauties posed on elbow-cushions the better to turn
coldly an exact profile on their importunate admirers,
it was expected of these last also that they should
have their silhouettes taken for the lady's pleasure.
And she, no doubt, pored over the learned Lavater's
plates, trying to see which passion dominated her
intended. . . . All this perished with photography.
We can go right through life " content enough " with
our full-face, giving our inner self away to every one
but our complacent selves.

These things ought not so to be. It is every man's
plain duty to see his profile once. . . .

Photography indeed, the chinless mortal's refuge,
threatens to play him false, for in its most artistic form

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

it long ago relapsed largely upon silhouette-effects
and now its popular exponents are hastily seeing,
with white screens and flashlights behind, what
profit can be got from this revival of the shadow-
portrait.

To defend Silhouette from the heavy standpoint
of those who claim it as a document would be mere
cruelty, an insult to a most dainty art. Perhaps
no Gainsborough or Lely, with flattering brush, could
throw the light on old coiffures that may be gained
from eight early silhouette prints of dressed heads
that lie in my portfolio ; probably no better record of
the first authentic Peeler could be found than that
quaintly hatted policeman who hangs upon the
wall at Knole ; certainly no portrait would be so
pitiless in its revelation to a female mind of *' the
hang of the skirt " in the eighteenth-century costume
as two full-length profiles, a rarity so early, showing
the coiffure and contour in an inimitable manner.
But these advantages, if such they be, are mere
side-issues to the connoisseur, who cares for none of
them.

No, if he had to justify the silhouette, he would soar
to far loftier heights, to Plato maybe and his image
of the Cave. Perverting that great philosopher's

THE SOFT CHARM OF SILHOUETTE
1. By Mrs. Bull. 2. Eda O., 1799-1819.

4. A Lady, unknown.

3. G. A. Girling, by Lane Kelfe.

A DEFENCE OF SHADOWS

idea of a man chained within a prison, seeing all men
and things that passed as shadows thrown against
the light and knowing them as outlines only, he
might build up a fine theory as to the reality of
shadows alone in a world where colour has been
proved a luxury added by each of us to that
vague Thing Itself. . . .

Luckily there is a simpler way. Izaac Walton,
having written immortally on fishing, added these
equally undying words : " And next let me add
this, that he that likes not the book should like the
excellent picture of the trout, and some of the other
fish." So I; or in the equally fine words of another
great man, " Si monumentum requiris, circumspice."
If you like not my pleading on behalf of shadows,
you should like the exquisite fineness of the profiles
by Mrs. Beetham, the dignity of Rosenberg, the
character of Edouart, the convincing pleasantness
of those simpler portraits that I have massed on one
page and might call after a scrapbook formula,
"Four Favourites" (pi. v). If you seek Silhouette's
best praise, merely turn these pages. Looking on
those dainty miniatures or chiselled outlines, artistry
rvperb in either case, the just man no longer will
judge Silhouette by the cheap specimens poured forth

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

for these last fifty years from the arcades and piers,
to which photography too long has banished its
defeated rival.

Absurd that these crude outlines, snipped for
six coppers and received with giggles, should any
longer be allowed to prejudice the judgment upon
Mrs. Beetham ! Nobody thinks the less of Cosway
because dear modern ladies persist in painting
miniatures, nor do we posthumously condemn Gains-
borough because he was a Royal Academician. . . .

The whirligig of time truly brings in its revenges,
and there are some who hope that the camera, which
has killed so much that was beautiful, from wood-
engraving downward, may yet see the West-end, its
one-time temple, again triumphantly invaded by
its ancestral foe. Nature's o^vn real art, the shadow.

Ill

THE MEN BEHIND
THE SHEET

CHAPTER III

THE MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

The mystic-sounding title to this chapter is largely
allegorical, for there is little reason to suppose that
all the profilists here named actually used a sheet, or
anything approaching it, whilst practising their art.

There is a familiar eighteenth-century print, from
Lavater's quarto edition, that clearly shows what may
be best described as the sheet method of taking
likenesses in shade. This is entitled " A Sure and
Convenient Machine for Drawing Silhouettes." Upon
the left, half hidden by his square sheet (paper, need
I add ?), stands the artist, totally absorbed ; centre,
as actors say, sits a lady of the period, so intent upon
looking her best that in an agony she clutches with
both hands the posts and stays which hold the
artist's sheet firm to her chair ; and to the right a
candle on elaborate carved stand, to lend a touch of
dignity no doubt to the whole studio.

A French variant differs only in the candle's greater
luminosity and in the head-dress of the lady, who has

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

abandoned the English negligi of loose hair for an
elaborate coiffure. Above the English print and
underneath the French occurs this diagnosis of the
sitter by Lavater : " This is the Character I would
assign to the silhouette of this Young person ; I find
in it. Goodness without much Ingenuity, Clearness
of Idea, and a ready Conception, a mind very in-
dustrious, but, little governed by a lively Imagina-
tion, and not attached to a rigid punctuality ; we
do not discern in the Copy, the Character of Gaiety
which is conspicuous in the Original ; but the Nose is
improved in the silhouette, it expresses more In-
genuity. . . ." Face-experts have never won the
name for gallantry ; nor would it seem (to be no less
unsparing) that aptitude in punctuation always
goes with skill in physiognomy.

A less -known print of slightly later period, entitled
simply " Method of Taking Profiles," clearly owes
its origin equally to whichever version of the other
was first in the field : for though the two protagonists
are lavishly redressed, their positions reversed, and
the candle given a more homely table, the chair is
copied slavishly, the man stands as before, the lady
still clutches at the post and stay. This artist
clearly did not wish to alter anything that possibly

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

could spoil a process probably unknown to him by
anything except his copy. Candle-stand and dress
were safe : but we may fancy him reflecting, this poor
nervous plagiarist, that if the lady let go of that
stay, it might mean wrecking the whole silhouette. . . .

Our own knowledge, unhappily, is not much
superior, for though there are advertisements of
sundry wonderful machines, which are considered
elsewhere in this volume, there is (so far as I can
learn) no way of discovering whether Rosenberg, for
instance, actually used any such contrivance or
whether, like most [modern silhouettists, he scorned
even the sheet method and trusted to his eyes and a
white background only. These mechanic chairs and
general abracadabra methods would appeal, I imagine,
only to so-called " Papyrotomists " and not to any
artist proper.

Lavater, however, was more concerned with
actuality than art ; he valued profiles only as the
most exact of portraits : and so is found giving the
most elaborate instructions to those who wish to
take a person's shade, but at the same time (be it
noted) in such a way as to make it clear that his
apparatus was not in ordinary use.

" The common method," he distinctly says (vol. ii.

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

chapter vii., 1789 octavo edition), "is accompanied
with many inconveniences. It is hardly possible the
person drawn should sit sufficiently still ; the
designer is obliged to change his place, he must ap-
proach so near to the person that motion is almost
inevitable, and the designer is in the most incon-
venient position ; neither are the preparatory steps
everywhere possible, nor simple enough."

Here, in this passage written at the heyday of shade-
taking, is the undoubted locus classicus, as pedants
say, or stock passage for the " common method " ;
and it seems to me that, with its cryptic last three
words, it lays itself open to just about as many con-
tradictory and utterly convincing explanations as any
table of statistics or debated scripture. Here, at any
rate, is what Lavater liked :

" A seat purposely contrived would be more con-
venient. The shade should be taken on post paper,
or rather on thin oiled paper, well dried. Let the
head and back be supported by a chair, and the shade
fall on the oil paper behind a clear, flat, polished glass.
Let the drawer sit behind the glass, holding the frame
with his left hand, and, having a sharp blacklead
pencil, draw with the right. The glass, in a detached
sliding frame " (grimly, be it added, like the business

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

part of a guillotine), " may be raised or lowered,
according to the height of the person. The bottom
of the glass frame, being thin, will be best of iron,
and should be raised so as to rest steadily upon the
shoulder. In the centre, upon the glass, should be
a small piece of wood or iron, to which fasten a small
round cushion, supported by a short pin, scarcely
half an inch long, which, also, may be raised, or
lowered, and against which the person drawn may
lean. By the aid of a magnifying lens, or solar
microscope, the outlines may be much more accurately
determined and drawn."

If this be " simple " by comparison, the common
method must indeed have been a nightmare ; but at
the risk of seeming obstinate, I will not, until proof
arrives, believe that artists like Miers, Rosenberg, or
Mrs. Beet ham, who claimed to rank with the great
miniaturists of their period, fastened their sitters into a
chair so reminiscent of the dentist's parlour or
expected them to look pleasant with the iron enter-
ing into their shoulder. . . .

In any case, the artist is his work, nor can his
methods have any interest beyond the technical. Of
the great profilists it may be said, that when the
shadow had been duly traced, their labours had not

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

yet begun. A child or an automaton could do so
much — and both, as we shall see, were doing it ere
half a century had passed. The life-sized shade must
first of all be brought down to prettier dimensions
— later, at any rate, by a machine, whatever these
first artists did — and then began the infinitely
delicate work which formed the artist's individual
hall-mark.

How individual, only a connoisseur or any one
observant beyond the usual can judge. Even with
those who used the scissors only, there is no confusion
possible ; an Edouart is as different from a Gapp as,
say, a Cos way from an Engleheart. Swift who so
soon as 1745 has more than one verse on the lady's
new accomplishment, remarks about Clarissa's shade
of a man, cleverly enough adorned with a " grey
worsted stocking " eye :

" / must confess that as to me, sirs,
Though I ne'er saw her hold the scissars,
I now could safely swear it is her's.^^

This being so, it has seemed to me worth while to
give a short description of the most characteristic
points in the work done by the best profilists. Many
silhouettes, *' Family " or collected, are unsigned ;

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

still more bear the wrong artists' names piously in-
scribed upon their back ; and it will be easy for any
one, using these notes and the accompanying plates,
to remedy these things, which most assuredly ought
not so to be.

Place aux dames! Indeed — as often — they de-
serve it.

To Mrs. Beetham must be awarded the palm of
merit among profilists, unless the judge be anyone
whose tastes run to a classic sternness. She, as
befits her sex, had nothing of that quality. Hers
not to leave Nature's own shade in its uncompromis-
ing, beautiful simplicity : she held the mirror up and
lo ! her sitters found themselves (one almost must
suspect) more graceful, delicate and fair than even
they themselves had hitherto suspected. No bow is
out of place ; no ribbon lies in any but a perfect
curve ; no single hair strays save where it is almost
fatally becoming ; no one could be more beautiful —
until you see the next.

Examine Miss Di Jones and Mrs. Mathews, who face
each other on plate vi, just as they were taken
together, in Fleet Street, during the month of July
1792.

The faces, as in all of Mrs. Beetham's shades, are

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

left most properly in a dead black ; her art is given its
full rein with ribbons, jewels, hair and dress. Be-
neath a microscope (and surely that is how she must
have looked at them whilst working) each hair,
one can literally state, may be separately seen. Before
work which combines so rarely the wonder of absolute
detail and the charm of general effect it is hard indeed
to refrain from the modern weakness of superlatives :
impossible for even the fruitiest conservative to hold
back from poor Silhouette, so long rejected and mis-
understood, the grand old name of " Art " — defamed
by every music hall and soiled with all ignoble use.

By no means every specimen retains its labels — the
dear Victorians have seen to that — and some have
even lost their frames : but I believe, till somebody
corrects me, that I have discovered a sure and easy
test for Mrs. Beetham's work in her odd convention
for finishing the bust. Most profilists cut off the body
with a natural curve, but Mrs. Beetham seems always
to have made it end in a way which reference to
the illustrations on plate vi, vii, or xxvi will make
clearer than two chapters of description. Rosenberg
had somewhat the same trick, but those who tm-n
to plate viii will find it different enough to be easily
distinguished.

en:

•8

CO
Z

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

No one, in any case, could fail to recognize the
touch of Mrs. Beetham. She is the very luxury of
Silhouette. The woman's hand is there, delicate,
fine : and when, as with our ladies here, the Beetham
decoration is around the portraits — firm white and
gold design, with more erratic spots inside — ^there
can be no mistake. Fine, dignified, old oval frames
in dark brown pear-wood lend the last touch to a
perfect decoration (plate vii).

Yet not the last, for Mrs. Beetham's best work is
painted on a convex glass ; behind, there is a slab of
chalk ; and thus Miss Di Jones throws her charming
profile, much as she did in the flesh more than a
century ago, dead black upon the white behind.
That Mrs. Mathews, on the right side of my mantel-
piece, can not do quite the same is merely a price
exacted by the laws of light and a mania for
" pairs."

Charles, of the same period and 130 Strand,
*' opposite the Lyceum," was another London pro-
filist who literally made shadow-pictures. Neither
artist kept to the one formula ; no doubt some
clients found the cream and gold glass too costly, so
that one finds both working on mere humble card,
whilst Charles upon his labels describes himself as

49 D

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

" the original inventor on glass." Upon the other
hand, both painted also miniatures on ivory (for^which
Charles asked four guineas), and on plate xxvii
may be found a nice specimen of Mrs. Beetham in
this — ^to me — ^less satisfying mood. No, having once
seen their real shadow-pictures, one feels inclined, as
urged by the advertisement, to refuse utterly All
Other Kinds 1 Charles' young dandy flings forward
on the chalk his bored, contemptuous shade in a
manner which, alas, is better not even attempted by
photography. (Plate iii.)

Charles was niggardly with labels, and unless
specimens are signed minutely below the bust or on it
(as with the last specimen) his hair-v/ork is the safest
clue. Charles painted hair by an ingenious formula
combining an apparent minuteness with rapidity of
execution. At a first glance his detail seems no less
astonishing than that of Mrs. Beetham ; but look
again and you will see that where that careful lady
conscientiously painted each hair of every separate
lock, the easy-going male, with a hand cynically free,
left on the paper a swift tangle, giving hardly less of
an effect. It must not, indeed, be supposed by any
ardent partisan in the fast-spreading sex-war that we
have here a patent indication of the female's superior

SHADOW-PORTRAIT ON GLASS
By Mrs. Beetham, 1795.
(In the possession of Francis Wellesley, Esq.)

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

thoroughness ; for Charles was an artist (was he not
R.A. ?) and as such quite willing to give labour where
it repaid its time. A glance at the beau's cravat or
ruffle will establish this.

It may be said of Charles, more even than of other
profilists, that he must be astounded, and at times
disgusted, if from the other plane he can observe the
many silhouettes in various collections that bear the
name of Charles. ... It seems, in fact, enough that
any specimen on card should be of the late eighteenth
centiu*y : " by Charles " appears forthwith upon its
back, without so much as that small " ? ", which
might allow a second trial hereafter in an age less
ignorant of Silhouette. The work in particular of
Mrs. Bull (plate v), another clever woman-profilist,
who worked " Opposite the India House " around
1785, is seldom signed and almost exactly similar
in style to that of Charles : a serious problem for
those anxious intelligently to put " attributions "
upon their collection.

Rosenberg is possibly the easiest quarry for those
engaged in this most fascinating sport. Let it be
said at once that in this, as in all else, rules are a mere
stumbling-block to those who light first on the excep-
tions : each of the great profilists experimented upon

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

methods other than his own ; but at his most typical,
Rosenberg of Bath is almost unmistakable, even if he
had been less lavish with his labels. Painted for the
most part on flat glass, of an uncompromising hard-
ness which (we shall see, when labels are examined)
he intended " in imitation of stone," encased generally
in a square brass frame with oval opening, his
portraits could never be confused with those of any-
body unless Jorden. He is the most severe of profile-
painters, and such curious aberrations as the blue sash
across a George IV in Mr. Wellesley's collection must
be accounted the exception. Colour, usually, rules
out Rosenberg.

Luckily, however, further proofs are still forth-
coming. Every collector worthy of the name wastes
hours in every day trifling with his pet specimens :
and once, unframing a fine Rosenberg — with no very
special object beyond the pleasure of reframing it —
I hit upon a very interesting fact. The black bust
had always seemed to be against a background of
white paper ; but now in one hand I held a black
profile upon glass and in the other a pink profile on
white paper !

Immediately four other Rosenbergs must be un-
framed — an excellent excuse for yet more waste of

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

time — and although bought from various sources
all of them showed the same backing.

Rosenberg, in fact, set his stern black outlines
against a bright pink background ; perhaps, I think,
with some idea of gaining an effect of marble ; and this
pink silhouette, left where the black-painted glass
has defied the colour-eating sun, is no less sure a proof
of Rosenberg's work than a label for those who find it
behind their specimens. Incidentally they will come
on a generous layer of antique paper, scribbled over
with brush-marks and pencil lines ; even, if so lucky
as myself, some little memory of the artist himself.
On one such pencilled sheet appears this fragment of
methodical direction :

Mrs. Richard . . .

No. 8 Georg . . .
before 4.

Rosenberg, it has been said, usually worked with the
black mass, an authentic shadow, and his weakest
portraits are those in which he tried to indicate a
ruffle or the wave of hair. The inconclusive thin
brown-looking outline that results is curious in so fine
a craftsman. For this reason he is more successful,
as a rule, with his male portraits. The method of

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

Charles or Mrs. Beetham suited Woman and her dainty
laces better than the hard outline of Rosenberg or
Edouart. The Bath beau who tilts his chin superbly
on plate viii would be even better, robbed of his
quite inconclusive ruffle.

If this be not enough for those who think they may
possess a Rosenberg, here is another hint. Mr.
Weymer Mills, in one of those dainty articles of his
which waft one back magically to the gay and charm-
ing period of Silhouette, remarks : "On the back of
each Rosenberg portrait, scarcely decipherable, is that
magic word Bath." I must, however, add for the
benefit of those whom this discourages, that long and
ardently as I have peered at the back of my seven
specimens (five of them with labels) I never yet have
come upon the magic word.

For those who find a fascination in this sport of
attribution, a sport at which some amateurs are all too
skilful, Spornberg might seem a godsend but in
reality is just the opposite. He is, in an expressive
phrase. Too Easy. There is no sport at all. A
Spornberg silhouette is literally " signed all over."

Spornberg, for line or elegance, is not to be com-
pared with the other great profilists who worked in
England at his period, the late eighteenth centiu-y.

<
-J
O

<
0-

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

There is a certain lack of definition, a fluffiness, about
his portraits, and a careless handling of costume
detracts not a little from the faces, which are life-like
enough. He probably would never have won any
reputation except for his originality of process.
Spornberg may be said to have adapted on glass the
earliest form of paper-silhouette — ^the " hollow-cut "
— and to have added a refinement. He painted in
black upon the inside of convex glass the hollow
outline, as it were, of his sitter's profile, so that the
glass was all opaque and black except for a white pro-
file. On this white portion he roughly painted, still in
black, hair, eye, ear, even lines or wrinkles, with just
a few brush-splutters that might be said to stand for
gown or coat. The portrait was now done. Sporn-
berg or an assistant now scraped an elaborate, although
crude, oval pattern round the portrait and next applied
red pigment lavishly behind, till portrait and border
alike stood out bright red against the sombre black.

Messy perhaps the method, and dubious the art
of its result : but none the less, set in its fine gilt oval,
a startlingly rich whole and a delightful decoration,
holding its own as such with almost any form of
silhouette.

Spornberg, in whom neatness cannot ever have

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

been the prime virtue, scratched a crude signature
before the red paint was applied. These inscriptions
vary between " W. Spornberg invenit Bath," and
" W. Spornberg fecit Bath," as well as in the absence
or presence of a date. Lady Sackville at Knole has
no fewer than eight Spornbergs of the Ansley family,
dated from 1773 to twenty years later. Two in my
collection (pi. ix), gems with an added value as a
gift of friendship, are both signed "W. Spornberg
fecit Bath " (except that neither of the t's is crossed),
but only upon the male portrait is the date set,
" 1793." To one of those at Knole we are indebted
for the knowledge of his workshop, 5 Lower Church
Street, Bath. In a day when every other building
bears its mural tablet, "Here lived So-and-So," it
would be worth while to commemorate in stone the
places where great men and fair ladies thronged
to have their portraits taken by this ** new and
fashionable " art, now dead.

Strictly, no doubt, Foster of Derby should rank
with the next century : but as he is said to have
lived from 1761 to 1864, there is some latitude in
time. Dates are the chief obstacle to anyone who
would explore a subject so long neglected and indeed
despised as Silhouette : and I have not been able to

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

discover exactly in what year Foster started work. A
portrait by him of Pope Pius VI in 1799 (pi. xxx) may
have been among his earliest achievements (Foster
in that year would be 38), or may have been merely
copied from Marchant's relief of the Pope published
as an engraving by Colnaghi in the early months of
the next year. In any case, whatever his century,
the fact that he worked in red brings him conveniently
on the scene here. Foster's red, however, pales into a
brown by Spornberg's, and is relieved with gold. Mrs.
Nevill Jackson thinks it probable that Foster used a
machine for taking the outline itself (that record
which a profilist would need who advertised, as most,
"Original shades kept"), but be this as it may, his
work upon that outline was both elaborate and good.
The face alone, in this case, is of a dark russet brown,
the hair and costume gold ; whilst on one specially fine
specimen presented to me by a kind dealer-friend, the
subject, besides the glory of a gold dress spattered
with minute gilt trefoil pattern, bears the adornment of
a gold hat trimmed splendidly in white and green.
This pattern on his ladies' dresses is indeed a kind of
Foster hall-mark. Another specimen, this time in
the rarer blue-grey, bears the same design — minute
spots grouped in tlirees — but gracefully enough in

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

white : for this is a Foster that lacks gold. The
portrait of Pope Pius VI has the papal insignia (I
choose a word at random) blazoned on its coat in
gold. Three men, two soldiers and a seeming under-
graduate, are done no less in red and gold, but each
has an effective touch of black up at his neck.

Foster was either not quite fortunate about his
sitters or else he exaggerated noses — a thought which
makes me doubt yet more his use of that machine —
but for the rest he gained a marvellous effect of life.
The perky soldier on plate xxx is always picked out as
a splendid study by those who suffer my collection,
knowing nothing about Silhouette and clutching
gladly at a human topic. " Can't you see him ? "
they exclaim. . . . And so indeed you can : the
rakish angle of his cap, the pouted chest, the half-
smile on his lips — dear me, to think that he lived
long before America had given us the great word,
swank I . . . Well, he avoided rag-time, and I hope
that Life was kind to him, as he deserved. He
cheers me up and is a friend of mine.

Foster, to my mind, has not been given his due
place among the greater profilists. Perhaps his
actual originality, his groping after a new form,
counted as nothing but a vice to people that knew

PAINTED IN RED ON GLASS
By Spornberg : Bath, 1 793.

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

not the Grafton Galleries. Foster is the very Post-
Impressionist of Silhouette. He was not satisfied
with the old order and its limitations : he wanted
freedom, demanded to get nearer Nature ; but (it
is here the parallel must fail) he seldom lost sight of
the beautiful. Perhaps the fact that he discarded
labels for the most part, signing underneath the bust,
may be a proof that he considered himself artist and
not showman. In any case he proved himself some-
thing of an epicure in frames. The typical brass-
oval of a Foster papier mache frame must have been
a luxury of cost, for it is good both in design and
workmanship ; but those who have experimented
know well the difference made in even the best
silhouette by any change of setting — and Foster
above all things was an experimentalist. Some of
his frames, in place of the acorn ring attachment
usual to papier mache, bear a brass crown surmounted
by a twisted ribbon whereon the name " Foster " is
stamped in relief. Sometimes (as in the portrait of
Pope Pius VI) he seems to have thought this sufficient
signature ; but on the other hand a pair in Mrs.
Cairnes' collection, quite conventional for such an
outlaw of the art as Foster, not only bear this Foster
scroll but also the full signature of Foster at 125

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

Strand (for the best in all art ever drifts to London).
Others, like one of George the Third, bear no clue
either upon frame or card, except that the reddish-
brown hue and general treatment of the gold lead even
the least optimistic of collectors to write " Foster "
on the back.

It is, however, fortunate that Foster for the most
part signed freely in one way or another, for he had
imitators even in his shade of brown. A pretty pair
of silhouettes thus coloured and touched with gold
in the collection of Captain Stanton, bears this
interesting label :

" Bath,
Mr. J. S. Mitchell

Profilist
17 Union Street.
Executes Likenesses in a superior style of
Elegance in Bronze Tints, &c., which contain
the most forcible expression of Animation
that can possibly be obtained by such mode
of representing the Human Countenance."

Those not ashamed to glance on, like a female novel-
reader, at a future chapter, will see that " a superior
style of elegance " and " most forcible expression "

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

are gems snatched from the Miers label. Mitchell,
however, in altering the word " convey " to " con-
tain " did not improve his copy ; nor can he be
accounted better in his portraits than old Foster.

Foster was liberally old before he died in 1864,
spanning the golden age of silhouette and the first
birth of its supplanter in a single lifetime ; and I do
not doubt that any keen soul who would risk a night
in Derby could still hear at second-hand the cen-
tenarian's racy tales of " People I Have Painted."

If in considering those giants who made Silhouette
an art in the late eighteenth centm-y, Miers has been
left till last, it is not by degree of merit, but rather
on a principle exactly opposite.

Even were comparisons not duly odious, it would
be hard to make a final judgment between Mrs.
Beetham and her Leeds rival, Miers. Each had
transcendent merits ; either was aiming at a rather
different thing. Not mine, then, to award the palm.
Taking my cue rather from that sphere where mere
spatial position counts for most — ^I mean the Music
Hall — I have, so to speak, given Mrs. Beetham the
top, Miers the bottom, of the bill. Thus, like the
artistes, each can claim to hold the premier position. . . .

John Miers, at any rate, was a fine craftsman,

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

quick to take a likeness and able to join obvious
fidelity with beauty of decorative effect. His work
falls rather naturally into three rough periods : Leeds,
early London, and nineteenth century. Of these the
first is easily best, not only in quality of rareness, but
in actual beauty. Head-dress, costume, laces — every-
thing of course favoured the artist then, but quite
apart from this, Miers in Leeds and during those
first years in London before the dawn of a new
century (he seems to have moved about 1790) worked
in pure black, resisting the temptation of allm*ing gold.
Painted on oval slabs of chalk, the face dead black,
feathers or laces shading to transparent grey ; his
early portraits have a soft quality yet never sink, like
some by Charles, to mere prettiness or insipidity. In
the authentic frames of oval hammered brass they
make both in shape and delicacy an ideal decoration
on a plain cream wall. A glance at the specimen
here shown (plate x), a specimen backed with the rare
Leeds label, will prove in a moment the impossibility
of a comparison too often made. Miers, no less than
Mrs. Beetham, was capable of detail ; he was a
niiniaturist of surpassing merit (plates xi and xxviii) ;
but whereas Mrs. Beetham's pride was clearly in the
wonderful minuteness of what one possibly may

PAINTED ON CHALK BY MIERS. LEEDS
Label unbroken : original brass frame.

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

call her trimmings, Miers above all things was out
for his effect. It must be said of him, indeed, that
all his portraits, of whatever period, have an air of
life that is utterly convincing.

The work of John Miers on first reaching London is
scarcely to be distinguished from that of his earlier
period. The label of course altered and the style of
framing : but still the portrait was plain black. Miers
unluckily dated but seldom ; only one specimen in
my collection, the miniature on ivory, has a minute
date, 1805, painted underneath the bust ; and it is
thus difficult to say at what date he began the gilt
work, which became almost a habit when he joined
partnership with Field. So far, however, as my
observation of specimens by Miers goes, it was not till
the perruque had vanished that the gold appeared.
Of unsigned silhouettes I possess two that show both
gold-touching and perruques ; the first reputed to
be Lord Howe, black and gold with a white stock, the
other one of those rare but delightful soldiers with
gay red coats and epaulettes of gold, which has in this
case strayed on to the hair.

As to this last embellishment, condemned so
heartily by that aesthete among silhouettists, Edouart,
let it be said at once that Miers, with the later Herv4

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

was almost the only artist who could employ it with-
out being vulgar. It cannot, indeed, be claimed that
its addition improved either the truth or the decora-
tive charm of his portraits, yet at its best it does gain
an effect of intimacy which does not offend the casual
critic and may have been delightful to relative or
lover. The nicest specimen of this work that I have
found is a curiously life-like portrait of a young man,
painted upon chalk, with each fold of the coat and
almost every hair of the head traced in a manner
delicate almost beyond credibility (plate iii). The face
itself, by now, is black no longer but of a dark brown,
which makes me wonder whether Miers had not sat
even for a moment at the feet of his new rival Foster.
What methods were or were not adopted by any
profilist it is impossible or rash to say, for here was
an art above all things of experiment ; but though
Miers painted upon card, I have yet to learn that he
ever cut a portrait out of paper. I have not even,
with certainty, yet found a Miers painted upon glass.
One, which was hopefully reported to me as
" Napoleon " (a name that I have since erased, along
with others upon sundry specimens, for reasons
mainly of costume and period), has certainly the
touch of Miers in his later manner. Indeed, if it be

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

by another hand, the treatment of the scarf has
almost gone beyond the limit of what one may call
justifiable plagiarism. Certainly a striking and firm
portrait, this silhouette is backed with wax of a
pink-tinged yellow applied upon the glass : a further
reason to regret the lack of label. Myself, I own to
prejudice against this wax-backing, valued by some
connoisseurs : it cracks on the least provocation and
even when whole lends no charm that I can see to the
original profile, nor was it much used by the best
artists of the early period. Mrs. Beet ham, it is true,
a notable enough exception, employed a brownish-
yellow wax as background now and then, for I have
seen authentic pairs with the unbroken label, but to
my mind this rather grimy shrine ruins the dainty
portrait, which stands out so prettily against the
white chalk of more normal specimens.

Miers, in any case, certainly painted upon ivory,
and it is still possible to pick up delightful miniatures,
under an inch long, dethroned no doubt from rings or
lockets by unappreciative Victorians. These are
usually signed " Miers " imder the bust in writing of
almost incredible minuteness. These vary from
the pig-tail period, severely drawn in black with just
the hair and ruffles melting to transparency, very

65 E

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

much like the Miers formula on chalk, on through
the early nineteenth century and London period of
that shown on pi. xxvii. and dated 1805, to specimens
with brown faces and elaborate gilt -touching. Mrs.
Fleming of Folkestone has in her collection a portrait,
in the middle period, of Sir Walter Scott, a miniature
gem apart from the interest of subject.

Some of these miniatures, by Mrs. Beetham and
the other giants of her art, have been spared in the
costly jewelled setting — ^lockets, boxes, rings — of
which their own age judged them worthy. Both
Mrs. Nevill Jackson and Mr. Francis Wellesley (pi. ix)
have specialized in this luxurious department, and one
may doubt whether the world holds many more of
these delightful trinkets among its stock of undis-
covered treasure-trove. Humble connoisseurs, or
those too late upon the scene, must thus console
themselves with the reflection, jaundiced and yet
philosophic, that frames are a mere accident (in
logic's sense) to the real silhouette-collector !

Other profilists there are ; workers on chalk, paper,
glass — of these last Jorden notably or Hamlet — ^who
cry for mention in a rapid survey of the great eighteenth-
century pioneers in this new and short-lived accom-
plishment, but I have mentioned all whose work is

'. :',J

SILHOUETTE JEWELS

I and 3 Ring. Miers ; 2 Locket, Mrs. Beetham ; 4 and 6. Brooch, Miers ; 5, Ring,

Gonord ; 7, Patchbox, Miers.

In the possession of Francis Wellesley, Esq.

MEN BEHIND THE SHEET

likely to fall in the way of any average collector;
most whose profiles were of the first rank in merit.

There are, however, perfect specimens to which,
unhappily, no name can be attached with any cer-
tainty at all. Bereft of label and signature alike, the
owner who can scribble great names at hazard on their
back is either a vain idiot or Hope incarnate. Under
this head (so far as I know) fall those splendid soldiers
with their red coats and gold buttons, of which a
beautiful example, from Mr. Wellesley's collection,
appears upon pi . xxxii. It is of course the proper thing,
indeed the only possible, to deprecate all bronze, and
still more any colour, on a shadow-picture ; yet when
I look on these glorious officers in their mellow colours,
nothing less scandalous than water-colour miniatures
with blackened faces, I realize in shame how far even
the most logical among us sacrifice our principles when
faced by beauty.

IV
DECADENCE

CHAPTER IV

DECADENCE

Silhouette, as I have shown, was always a thing of
infinite variety. From its first birth, as a mere
portrait cut from paper, there were variations ; for
quite apart from differences in size, half the earliest,
indeed the most delightful specimens, were cut
literally " from " white paper, leaving the face
hollow, and laid on a black background so that the
result was a black profile just as in the later process.
Sad, indeed, that these masterly portraits are but
seldom signed (though one in the Wellesley collection
bears the name of Mrs. Harrington, and those of
the 1790 period which have a dark grey backing
may safely be ascribed to Torond, 18 Wells Street).
Later artists, as time grew scarcer, doubtless found
it easier to snick the portraits out in black, but
it cannot be denied that the old white-cut process
gave a greater softness. The lower lady on pi. iv,
who is shrined in a unique old oval pewter
frame, has a roundness and a fullness of face which,

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

achieved with such simpUcity, has won the admira-
tion of a dozen artists. More than one stubbornly
refuse to rank a Miers or a Mrs. Beetham above a
silhouette of such fine economy. Who shall decide ?
It is the old, old fight — luxurious charm v. classical
restraint, and I will not be referee.

In any case, these white hollow-cuts were possibly
thought freakish at first by advocates of Silhouette
as a mere shadow, often full -sized, cut from the black
paper : and in quite early days there had been other
variants. In Mr. Wellesley's collection there is a
convex glass that bears the head of George III in
black, and then behind it, in faint grey, his consort's,
very much as one might see them on a coin (pi. xii).
Another George III, presented to me by my friend
and fellow-collector, Mr. John Lane, is cut normally
in black, full-length ; but there is a clear mark at the
spot where his chest has once borne a spangled decora-
tion. More curious than either is a specimen once in
the famous Montague Guest collection and now owned
by Mrs. Weguelin. This is inscribed in faint pencil,
barely legible : " Silhouette taken at Weimar in
1776-7 of Mdlle. Thun (? Thier) and of the society
that met at her house, amongst whom were Sir H.
Dalrymple, Sir Robert Keith, the Earl of Pembroke,

GEORGE HI. & QUEEN CHARLOTTE
Painted on glass, probably by Charles (in the possession of Francis Wellesley, Esq.)

DECADENCE

and General Harrison." The " society " was clearly
taken each side of a table : nine heads in all, five
upon one side and four on the other. Of these the
front two, a man and a woman, are 'painted in black on
a sheet of paper, whilst those behind are in a grey that
intensifies to black only at the actual outline. These
heads, that float bodiless in air like some dream-
creatures, are cleverly drawn, but not too cleverly
for any amateur of the days before Bridge ousted all
the talents or turned them to professions. The nine
members of this select society were, in fact, obviously
painted by the tenth. Was this tenth person a
ninth man (so to speak), or was it possibly just one
lady to redeem Mdlle. Thun (? Thier) from the charge
of a reckless social extravagance ?

Families, again, were sometimes taken at one time,
though not in the grotesque way fashionable later.
One of my earliest finds, when I first fared out from
my Oxford rooms in the long quest for silhouettes,
was a delicious quintette upon glass : father, mother,
and three children, taken just after 1800 and probably
by Rought of Oxford. They were a pleasant family
but on such convex glass that daily I died deaths in
fear of careless friends or housemaids, for what more
terrible remorse for any man than to have broken a

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

treasure so intimate and gentle after survival of a
century ? At last I sold it, thoroughly unnerved, and
lately saw the Happy Family — a horrible regret to
me — ^radiant as ever on its bulging glass in Mr. Welles-
ley's collection. . . ,

All these variations there were in early specimens,
but rare, and on the whole. Silhouette kept itself
clean till somewhere round the twenties, as the most
simple and yet not least effective of the arts. There
were those who cut profiles, those who painted them
on chalk, glass, ivory, or card, a few who toyed with
coloured coats or chairs ; but always they retained
the base idea that, work as they might upon the
frills and laces, the face should be a shadow-portrait,
plainly represented in black or some properly dark
colour. This rule was observed even by that bold
and not quite happy rebel, Phelps, who painted
silhouettes with coloured dresses in chalk before
1790.

Who has ever been content ? — unless it were an
animal. Philosophers, from the Greek tragedians
down, point out that Man alone is never satisfied.
The appetite appeased grows into a desire. Hunger
paves the road to Gluttony, and through Comfort
is the quick road from Need to Luxury. If Balaam's

DECADENCE

donkey came to life again to-day, he would be happy
with a thistle or two and his own old coat : Balaam,
were he revived, would stand out for French cooking
and a telephone. It is only a weak groping for excuse
which makes Man call the donkey stupid, so that on
the whole we may feel glad here to be just collectors,
not philosophers, and pass happily along.

Enough to say, then, that the nineteenth century
was far from satisfied. This art, that had arrived
with all the pomp of something hideously Greek,
seemed cheap to a new generation, and altogether far
too easy. The scissor-habit was so easily acquired :
snick, snick, quickness half the battle (everybody who
saw Granny practise is agreed on that), so why pay
anyone to do it ? Every one, in fact, was doing it.
The new toy had become a very ancient game.
Simplicity and cheapness were good reasons for
amateurs to try : the worst possible inducement for
anyone to visit a professional.

Thus the Professors, as they had now begun to be,
were doubtless driven to a new attraction, and what
more probable than gold ?

Miers it was, or Field, so far as I can tell, who first
began to add the gold as an accustomed thing.
Certainly these two, with Frith and Herv^, made the

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

best use of it. Miers especially, as I have said in the
last chapter, by leaving the face plain brown and
painting upon chalk, managed to lose hardly any
dignity by what was certainly a far from wise depart-
ure ; and Field's work, during the time of partnership
can scarcely de distinguished from that of his co-
worker. Of those signed under the bust " Field,
2 Strand," some are in the brown and gold style ;
others, less successful, have black faces touched with
some pigment that is more a yellow than a gold, and
certainly depressing. Cheerfulness, upon the other
hand, was a strong point with Herve farther down the
street, at number 145. To his brown full-lengths he
added gold of such a glow as to seem almost trans-
parent, giving out light like Nijinsky's arms in " The
Blue God." This shading he applied with rare
discrimination, resisting the prevalent temptation
towards overdoing it. By using it only upon one
side of the body he gained a genuine effect of some one
standing in a strong yellow light, and can probably
claim first place among those who used gold-touching
on the full-length portrait. Generally, but not
always, a washed-in ground-work ended in a tree that
topped the sitter's shoulder on the " lighted " side,
and a solidly theatric gentleman who takes a pose

CUT SILHOUETTE, GOLD-TINTED
By Herv>; (about 1830).

. b • » 4 4

*• • C >c

ft • c<- « •

DECADENCE

thus in one specimen stands in another before a curtain
which more fittingly supplants the tree. Herve often
stamped his portraits, back or front, with his name
and address, but I have not yet found a dated speci-
men. Young men, however, with hats like city
chimney-pots and puUed-in waists to counteract a
thrust-out chin (pi. xiii), reduce the date with some-
thing very much like certainty to 1830. Upon a
slightly later head-and-shoulder portrait of a girl, in
dark grey touched with black, the legend runs :
"Herve Artist, 172 Oxford Street and 248 Regent
Street," so that I hope he had prospered. F. Frith,
the last of this quartette which managed to use gilt
without vulgarity, apparently is in the small band of
provincials who meeting with Success have not been
drawn by her to London. At any rate, I have not
come across a specimen as yet that gives him a town
gallery. One, very lavish in its gilt, is signed in full
upon the ground- work, " F. Frith, Dover, Kent,"
and dated " 1825." The 2, however, has been
tampered with by some one who desired to own — or
sell ? — a silhouette of Wellington, as which it was
reported to me by a trustful dealer. Considered
from the aspect of technique, it shows one very in-
teresting feature. The white band that goes across

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

the soldier's chest is represented by a broad cut
through his body from epaulette to thigh. The metal
clasp (I speak as a fool) is thus painted on the actual
card, though sword-hilt and scarf, cut from the paper,
bridge this ruthless gash. It is certainly a quite
original device and possibly justified by its success.
More conventional and no less charming is the speci-
men which I have named " The Girl with the
Bonnet " (pi. xiv). Frith in this case has merely cut
an ordinary silhouette and then embellished it with
gold-work of amazing fineness. A little softness has
been gained for hair and lace by a few touches of
brush-work upon the background, a trick probably
unjustifiable by any strict canons drawn up for the art
of Silhouette. Certainly, however, this little lady
with her ringlets, her hat held shyly like a flower-
basket, and those decorous trousers, stands trium-
phantly before her sundial to vindicate in innocence
the shocking proposition that decadence can have
its charm. She may not be pure silhouette, but
she is an unqualified delight and we will throw no
stones at her creator.

Of another profilist who cut portraits from the
twenties onwards it is less easy to say pleasant things.
Master Hubard, I fear, was of those luckless artists

m5J i

._J

THE GIRL WITH THE BONNET
Cut and gold-tinted by Frith, Dover.

DECADENCE

who win a reputation during life, only to lose it
shortly after death. The Londoners of his day loved
him. At first an infant phenomenon, he soon grew up
into a Gallery. The multitudinous examples extant
prove it was the thing to have your profile taken
at the Hubard Gallery. Above all, he took school-
boys, squeezing their faces to shrew-like minuteness
and topping them with an enormous cap. Those
were the Spartan days, before a home revolved
naturally around its youngest inmate, and one may
imagine that a visit to the gallery was not unmixed
delight. " What a pity," mothers would say, intent
upon the current aim of Putting Boys into Their
Proper Places, "that you are not clever like that
gentlemanly and industrious little fellow."

Hubard was of his age and his age loved him dearly,
both in London and New York. Thousands of little
boyish heads, and hardly fewer full-length portraits,
survive to prove his popularity. Mainly they are cut
in plain black, but not a few of the ladies are elaborately
gilt, and a few even venture on to white and blue
One, of a K.G. unknown, shows the red uniform of an
anaemic hue under a gold beard. Perhaps the kindest
things to say of Hubard are that he was cheap and
terribly unequal. He advertised " a strikingly correct

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

likeness with a frame and glass for one shilling ..."
and as proof that he could hit off a good portrait one
need only look at the young dandy on pi. xv. This
is a firm piece of work, equal to Edouart except in its
flat treatment of the hair, and full of character. The
stick is painted, otherwise it is pure silhouette beyond
a doubt or cavil. Had the boy- wonder kept himself
straitly to this less flowery path, he might have been
accoimted worthier of his distinguished, nay his
Royal, patrons.

Indeed, however, looking further afield, one may
admire in wonder his restraint or that of J. Gapp,
doggedly cutting plain black profiles at his tower on
the Chain Pier at Brighton. They were not gems of
art ; anatomically they admitted criticism; -but they
made a sincere attempt at holding up the old tradi-
tions. True, offered one and sixpence extra, he
would add the gold, but either he was not persuasive
or his patrons poor, for all that I have seen are plain.
In one a youth in a distinctly Edouart pose stands
by a vase upon an outdoor terrace (a favourite spot
with the great Frenchman, too), and I prefer the
portrait of " James Rosier, Junr., 1827 " (pi. xv).
Perhaps James, junior, was a vocalist, and certainly
his pose results in a sad heaviness towards the feet, yet

r'-

YOUNG BUCKS

Cut (1) by Master Hubard & (2) by Gapp (1827.)

DECADENCE

there is firmness in the handhng of his features and
something original about the formula for showing
buttons. This was a half-crown prudently laid out,
and eighteenpence more might have spelt disaster.

Meanwhile, all around these devotees of the real
Silhouette who kept the lamp alight through the dark
thirties, professionals and amateurs were glorying in
outrage more astounding at each new adventure.

It was a small enough thing to add gold eyebrows,
gold lips, gold cheeks, to the already golden hair ; but
that was only a beginning. Green, light or dark, for
no reason to be gleaned from Nature's shadows, took
the place of black or brown, whilst white was freely
added to the gold. Foster, it has been seen, made
bold experiments in colour, but usually with logic and
good taste behind him. His imitators cared for none
of these things, and so charming ladies of Victoria's era
have come down to us with olive faces and gold
ringlets : silhouette faces but gay-coloured gowns,
black hands but gay-coloured faces ; or lapsing from
the silhouette in nothing but their white silk stockings.
One man of the sixties, duly cut from paper, stands
before a background highly tropical in a grey suit and
white shirt, sporting a gold seal, a red handkerchief,
white hair (in parts), and a brick-coloured face.

81 F

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

Only stock, boots, and hat are black, so that one
marvels why the portrait should be cut at all ; a
silhouette by name but a bad miniature in fact.

And yet — and yet it does not do to dogmatize.

Time and again, upon the verge of framing a stern
canon ; " The real art of the silhouette is in the piu-e
black shade, and every one who adds a colour to it is,
as Edouart laid down, a vulgar mountebank," I have
had an accusing vision. I have seen those brown
Fosters so full of humanity, the fine gold-work of
Miers, Spornberg's red defiant glow, and — ^above all,
yes, let me now confess — ^two yoimg Victorians in
yellow maple frame, filling the room about them with
the gentle fragrance of their restful age. They sit,
these sisters, unconcerned by any wish to vote, to
smash, to burn ; giving no thought to any problem
but for those of their small social circle ; totally
absorbed in the new song-album that has come
down to them from London. Some one has told
them once that they are strikingly alike, and this has
pleased the elder. . . . Their dress is similar, with just
enough variety for their admirers. Flowers are on
the table, blue and yellow — can they be forget-me-
nots ? — ^whilst pen and albums lend an air of culture.
Sweet creatures of soft profiles and delicious cork-

DECADENCE

screws, for better or for worse their type has passed
away : but here they are, by a profilist's art, better
expressed for ever than in a score of tomes on the
Victorian Age : (pi. xvi).

This picture (for it is no less, if by no other right
than its fine composition) bears a legend : " The
Misses Awdry, Lund House, Near Milksham : 1844."
I hope they later took another name, for here are
grandmothers of whom a man might properly feel
pride.

Beaumont of Cheltenham, who painted them,
perhaps went to Lund House upon the common basis
of *' Attendance Abroad Double." This, with his
subject's charm, would then explain how he came to
achieve a silhouette so far superior to his average
bare-looking and stiff-cut production.

But — and here is my crux — save for the beads and
topmost album, there is no spot of black about it !
They are a harmony in browns, these sisters, with
just a touch of white for laces and two dim-red albums.
Their faces are cut with a master's firmness, the eye-
lashes touched in upon a dark cream backgroimd.
Dignity and restfulness breathe in this whole portrait,
which I would not change for fifty pure black
Edouarts.

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

What then of our canon ? A compromise, I fear.
Perhaps we may arrive at it by saying that qud art
(the don-like Latin tag gives me new courage) a
silhouette should be no more than the pure shadow,
anyhow as to the face, but that qud charming decora-
tion there is no possible objection to a prudently
selected colour. No doubt Edouart was terribly
artistic by all abstract canons when he produced that
stiff and frugal tea-party which adorns pi. xli ; but
I'm afraid it languishes in a portfolio, whilst I pay
daily homage to my dear brown ladies. Madame
Dorotti, too, in Ebury Street, owns among her private
treasures a delicious study in dark green and white
of a girl with all her dainty laces shown in touches so
light that her hair peeps through their transparency.
This is signed " W. M. Young del, 1836." Perhaps it is
the work of an accomplished amateur, for Silhouette
was taught in the young ladies' seminaries, nor in
those days did every one who found a latent talent
leap gaily at once into the professional arena. In any
case, amateur or not, this lady of the olive hue will
serve to emphasize our needed subdivision : pure Art
— ^unadulterated Charm.

And colour, after all, was but the least heresy
attached to their black art not less by countless

THE MISSES AWDRY
Cut and painted by Beaumont, in browns.

DECADENCE

itinerants than by innumerable amateurs. Paper or
glass was not enough by now : silk, horn, wood,
copper, glass were drawn into the use of Silhouette.
Portraits duly cut in black were dressed elaborately
with actual embroideries. Jewels and buttons were
added recklessly in gold (sometimes, as with two
owned by the Rev. Forster Brown, on glass). Novelty
was even sought by cutting bodies off at that enormity
of compromise, the three-quarter length. Coloured
paper of every hue conceivable was tried. The early
hollow-cut was revived and promptly robbed of all
significance by gold-paint added to the black back-
ground. Tumblers were made with Nelson or
Wellington imbedded, a silver silhouette, inside the
thick white glass. The old-time profile was combined
with hair-work, laid on a mirror, gummed to a slab of
chalk : anything purposeless to gratify the wish for
Something New. Skeleton leaves were obviously,
then, another form of background, or iridescent
paper recalling the crackers of our youth. Often an
older formula was tried — and ruined. The beautiful
old red-coat soldiers of the eighteenth century were
thus sanction for young ladies all in colour save for a
face apparently unwashed. In the same way that
charming notion so prettily exploited by Charles or

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE'

Mrs. Beetham, the loved one's very shadow cast upon
chalk placed behind, was turned into a horror by these
later vandals. This was a full-length era — ^head-
and-shoulders was probably accounted cheap ! — and
so gloomy-trousered men or shapeless -bodied boys
were painted thinly on protruding glass, and the proud
owner told to hang the whole " not exceeding five
feet from a side light." The result possibly can be
imagined : certainly it shall not be portrayed. Mrs.
Bromley-Taylor owns the most pleasing example of
this misguided industry that I have met. A marine
backgroimd, with rocks and lighthouse, lends interest
to the customary full-length figure. This picture is
inscribed " by J. Woodham from Milverton : A° D"^-
1825," but I cannot help feeling that some one has
blundered as to the equally usual directions, for in this
case they run, "To be placed upon a south or back
light not exceeding five feet in height. ..."

More original, if no less superfluous, was another
device invented, I think, in the later twenties by some
unwitting anticipator of Bertillon. The sitter placed
his or her thumb into some thick creamy substance
and made thumb-prints upon the inside of a convex
glass. These were duly scraped away, except so
much as made the face or sometimes the cap, collar,

DECADENCE

dress, etc. ; and black was added to portray the
rest, whilst one in the Wellesley collection has gold
and mauve touches upon a blue thumb -printed base.
The result seems to me more quaint than beautiful,
but these silhouettes, entitled " Thumb-print," are
greatly accounted by a few collectors.

The next step was just as inevitable then as it now
seems incredible. Silhouette, robbed of its old simple
dignity, an art no longer, must become a trick. There
had always been machines for taking profiles. Allu-
sion has been made to these already, and on a stray
page (from what old magazine, I wonder, of the
twenties?) I have lately found this rather illuminating
passage : " Next to this is a plain black profile, to
which I can say, ' ThaVs me.' I took it into my head
the other day to walk into a shop and suffer the
tnachine, as they call it, to be passed over my visage ;
and here I am quite black in the face, with a smart
ebonized frame, and an inner gilt edge, all for four
shillings ! What a depreciation of the fine arts, if
indeed this can be said to belong to them ! " But
in this passage, which throws an interesting light
upon the price of those now precious ebonized black
frames, the reference is to something in the nature
of a long and flexible rod so contrived that one

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

end of it transferred to paper the contour over which
the other end was passed (Edouart speaks scornfully
of the tickling caused by "a piece of wire"); and
much the same, no doubt, was meant by J. P.
Tussaud, who, a showman by hereditary right, drew
London of the twenties to his wax-works with the
vague announcement : " . . . has a machine by which
he takes profile likenesses." Herve equally boasts
on a label to have " taken the likenesses of upwards of
12,000 persons " by the use of Hankin's " patent
machine."

Quite a different contrivance, however, was upon
the market before Victoria was Queen. Perhaps no
clearer hint as to its nature can be given than by the
following announcement, culled from the back of an
apparently late Georgian profile :

" Now Exhibiting,

In Apartments over the shop of

Mr. Liddell, Shoe Maker,

Corner of the Market Place, Huddersfield.

PROSOPOGRAPHUS,

The Automaton-Artist.

This splendid little figure possesses the extra-
ordinary power of drawing by Mechanical
88

DECADENCE

means the likeness of any Person that is placed
before it in the short space of one Minute.
It is hoped that the Inhabitants of Hudders-
field will come forward with their usual spirit,
to encourage a piece of ingenuity at once so
novel and curious.

A likeness in Black for one shilling,
Colo^l^ed from Is. Qd. upwards.
Open from Ten till Eight."
Here if ever, surely, is a use for the old tag : ** Com-
ment is superfluous." Indeed, the time is better spent
in sadly throwing back the fancy to forty years before,
when all the modish bucks and belles were swarming
to the galleries of Charles, Rosenberg, or Mrs. Beetham.
Art is long — but popular caprice is short. Enough to
say, for those who have no Greek, that this Prosopo-
graphus, with the quite subtle tinge of magic in its
sound, is nothing but a mongrel word to mean face-
delineator : nor can I resist a vicious wonder what
intervals exactly the " splendid little figure " needed
for its meals. . . .

Whether it is this particular automaton to which
Sam Weller alluded in his historic love-letter — " in
much quicker time and brighter colours than ever a
likeness was took by the profeel macheen . . . altho'

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

it does finish a portrait and put the frame and glass on
complete, with a hook at the end to hang it up by,
and all in two minutes and a quarter " — is a question
that may be left to Mr. Matz and the Dickensians.

By the side of this and kindred pieces of ingenuity
(which I am utterly confident Huddersfield encouraged
with its Usual Spirit), there is almost nothing to be said
against the following :

" PERFECT LIKENESSES.

No. 4, Wells Street, Third door from Oxford Street.
(By His Majesty's Special Appointment.)
Jones' Reflecting Mirrors, at One Guinea each, for
taking Likenesses in Profile or full Face : also.
Landscapes and Views from Sea, &c.
They are made on so easy a Plan, that a child of ten
years of age cannot fail to take a perfect likeness
with them . . .
Perfect Likenesses taken in Miniature Profile at
2s. 6d., and painted on Glass or Chrystals, in a
stile of superior elegance, from 5s. to 18s. each.
Miniatures neatly painted from Three to Five and
Ten Guineas each.
N.B. — Such who wish to see the effect of the above
instrument pay One shilling each, which will be
returned on purchasing of either the above
instrument, or sitting for an Impression Plate
Likeness."

A VICTORIAN YOUNG LADY
Cut silhouette touched with white paint.

DECADENCE

This advertisement, found in a scrap-book, is un-
luckily not dated, but its type and general appearance
point to somewhere around 1825.

By the thirties, in any case, Silhouette was nothing
but a freak. Endless itinerants of little merit divided
up the less sophisticated parts of the Homeland
between them. F. W. Seville cleverly staked out a
claim on Shrewsbury and the Midland schools, where
he adorned prim-looking scholars with unconvincing
gold. Others visited America. London probably
had proved a little cold : all ready now, the fickle jade,
for a more hideous darling, the daguerreotype.
Silhouettes grew cheaper — and more thick with gold.
Sometimes, if left plain black, the lines and shadows
were pushed out from behind, to form a high relief.
Fuzzy-looking ladies pranced about on horses that
nowadays would be condemned by the authorities.
Line, form, massed effect : silly thoughts like that
had vanished ! Everything was niggly, tortured.
The highest praise remained for something new.

At the British Museum, in the Mediaeval Room (for
humour has no place in a museum), there may be found
a piece of stone which bears a natural white profile
on it. Black plaster has been added above to round
off the skull and on it is inscribed : " O, my country ! "

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

No doubt it is meant to be Mr. Pitt, but it would have
been Chamberlain if he had only been invented. This
freak-portrait, which is described as Lusus Naturce,
seems to me the last comment upon Silhouette. The
time had come now for aquarium or pier. Never
had any art so swift a decadence.

Yet — did it fall maybe with its epoch ? Did it,
like painting, find costume and atmosphere alike too
ugly ? Did it only hide its dainty head until a fifth
George brought back " Elegance and Taste " ?

These questions are too deep for me, and I am
prejudiced. I fling the horrors of my dear art into
deep portfolios and hang its best work only on my
walls. If I am asked for the Victorians, I point
blatantly to the Exceptions : Beaumont's two
sisters, the Foster soldier, Frith's girl with the bonnet,
or another child who stands in an incredible costume
with a sick-looking bird upon her index-finger. White
ribbons, white stockings, and beautiful white drawers
relieve a dress sombre otherwise beyond the wearer's
years. She stands between two mountains and
around her there hop other, less favourite, birds. Or
maybe they are tufts of grass. . . .

Well, well : she is very charming, and sometimes
I wonder what Miers would have made of anyone

DECADENCE

with such a bonnet (pi. xvii). One thing is certain,
neither he nor any of the great profiHsts of 1790 would
ever have attempted more than a mere head-and-
shoulder. This full-length mania was no small
portion of the Decadence. But what restraint or
classicism could anyone expect in an age that wor-
shipped Berlin wool-work and made' a religion of
antimacassars ? Let us be thankful, rather, that
there are exceptions.

V
EDOUART

CHAPTER V

EDOUART

Things were not by any means so desperate as this
with Silhouette, although the gold-work reigned
supreme, when Augustin Amant Constance Fidele
Edouart came, with almost managerial solemnity,
upon the scene. Before his discovery in 1825 that
he could take a profile, he had worked portraits in
hair. He was assuredly therefore an artist, and he
meant no one to forget it. He cut himself proudly
adrift from all former practitioners of silhouette
(a word imported by himself, though borrowed from
Lavater), and set himself with confidence to the task
of placing his art in its due position. It is only one
among poor Edouart's countless tragedies that most
of Silhouette's enormities were perpetrated after his
renaissance. . . .

Edouart needs understanding. It is lucky there-
fore that he wrote a book. Had he written five we
should have learnt no more about the man. for he
who cried, " 0 that mine enemy would write a book,"

9T G

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

knew that before a second venture the art of self-
concealment dawns. Edouart wrote only one, and
it is a full revelation. The fellow struts, magnificent,
complacent, through its hundred and sixteen small
pages. Grievances, yes : he was not treated with a
due respect by many : but what of that ? It was
their ignorance I He got his due from Royalty I
Edouart gave us the term silhouette, and never
thought of the word swank. . . .

He had got, in any case, the secret of being accepted
very much at his own valuation. An ex-soldier of
Napoleon, a refugee in a strange country, he yet
claims that, when this great gift of Silhouette had
been revealed to him, his first customer was no less
than a Bishop. This was Dr. Magendie of Bangor.
The sting, however, of this tale is in the fact that
forty copies of the silhouette were ordered at five
shillings, and all the family was done as well, so
that it is possible that Edouart, no less than human
in his self-deceptions, forgot the earlier patrons of
humbler origin or smaller orders.

The book wherein Edouart unveils ingenuously his
tragedies and triumphs is entitled " A Treatise on
Silhouette Likenesses." Published in 1835 by Long-
mans, it is now extremely scarce, partly no doubt

MR. REILLY (?). MAGDALEN COLLEGE. 1827.
Cut by Edouart.

EDOUART

by reason of a small edition but also because it has
been broken up by dealers or scrap-book compilers
tempted with its many lithographs in silhouette by
a Cork printer. Edouart, being of those who regard
their title-page as a cheap advertising medium,
describes himself as " Silhouettist to the French
Royal Family and Patronized by His Royal
Highness The Late Duke of Gloucester and the
principal Nobility of England, Scotland, and
Ireland. . . ."

Edouart 's troubles concerned themselves partly with
customers who were either dissatisfied with their own
faces or refused to pay. For one of these last, indeed,
he retails with obvious pleasure how he devised a
fitting punishment. Taking the unmistakable like-
ness of this mean patron, he made it end, from the
waist downwards, as a corkscrew. Adding a ring
(all cut, of course) by which the top-hat hung on to
a hook, he called the whole :

PATENT SCREW FOR FIVE SHILLINGS

and hung it in his window, for every one to see. This
story he tells in a chapter gloomily entitled " Grievances
and Miseries of Artists."

A much greater tribulation, however, than this was

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

the treatment received by the sensitive profilist
from those with whom he came socially in contact.
Feeling deeply that his craft had been a despised
one, he was at pains to show how different all other
silhouettists were. These, by a charming Gallicism,
he accuses of " Gothic taste," whilst he constantly
refers to himself as an Artist and seldom grudges a
big A. Nobody must think that he took up his art
after a long search for some way to make money.
No ! Dining with some friends, he criticized a much
admired me.chine-cut silhouette. " Could he do
better ? " the daughters of the house teasingly
inquired. Spurred by their taunts to " a fit of moderate
passion," he could, and did. He snipped a profile —
with " facility and exactness " — from an old envelope,
and blacked it from a candle-snuffer. In such a
drawing-room way did Edouart fittingly embark
upon his art, taking the hideous risk of being " cut
from society " ; and he narrates how his " talent
showed itself so strongly " that not only did he over-
work, but even in his dreams " was cutting likenesses
of great personages. Kings, Queens, etc."

Ah ! in those words lie Edouart's real tragedy.
His poor swollen head never quite recovered from
royal patronage. It was in 1830 that he took the

100

EDOUART

likenesses of Charles X and all his suite at Holyrood.
Even an ex-king was too much for Edouart, and
from that day nobody in England was quite polite
enough. Imagine that he, Silhouettist to the French
Royal Family, should be " placed on a level with the
caravan man " or subjected to the insults of ordinary
people who, attracted by the new word silhouette,
came into his studio and flounced out saying, " Oh,
they are all black shades ! " Conceive a mere land-
lady refusing to receive " a man who does these
common black shades " ! Picture to yourself the
feelings of an artist, walking arm-in-arm with "friends
who moved in circles of high life " and hearing the
riff-raff remark, *' Who can she be, that lady with
the black shade man ? " . . . Edouart, a soldier
and a gentleman, could not inflict such insults upon
his acquaintance and began to walk alone, with the
result that " persons of high rank in society " often
accused him of an unseemly pride.

But much worse was to come.

Received at length in one town \^itH'^} ly^e pojyip:
which he thought nothing but h\s* due, , Edouart; w^s;
lent a house by the very governor°b*f thfe 6dstle, who'
hoped that the boards " might be strong enough
for the exercise of his profession " and the crowds it

101

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

would attract, urging him to practise only on the
ground floor in mere prudence. Here was flattery
indeed ! Edouart, one may see, was in the seventh
heaven, thinking it a dream. Then — ^read this with
care, ye who think Juliet's silly accident to be real
tragedy ! — ^then the governor stripped off his coat
and suggested a preliminary practice. On relent-
lessly the drama moves, until the governor, amazed,
reads out the letter of introduction which had made
him receive the profilist with such respect : "I
recommend to your notice Monsieur Edouart, the
famous Pugilist. . . ."

Enough ! Those with imagination can supply
the rest.

It may be said, however, that England, although
obviously rated as an inartistic country well content
with the profile-machine and very different from the
French Royal Family, yet supported Edouart in
gallant manner. No author, no actor, no divine, no
soldier, too famous for his studio, whilst at Oxford
^ijtd Camlaridgc,; which he particularly favoured, the
: luosi. leafTjiied dons did not disdain to have their
profiles taken. One little bundle of Oxford Edouarts
that has come down as a whole includes such names
as Dr. Buckland the geologist, holding a prehistoric-

102

• • • >

MR. LISTON IN HIS OWN CHARACTER
Cut by Edouart.

EDOUART

seeming skull in hand ; Blanco White the theologian,
seated in a chair ; the Rev. John Gutch, historian ;
and Benjamin Parsons Symons, Vice-Chancellor of
the University, all taken in the one year 1828. Nor
was America less kind, for here too, when he trans-
ferred his studio thither in 1839, the greatest of the
land surged to his studio. Mrs. Nevill Jackson has
lately had the pleasure of returning to the White
House as a gift the silhouette of John Tyler, President
of the United States, taken there by Edouart in
1841.

It might be thought, then, that Edouart would have
been a contented man and not have girded so bitterly
at the poor public or needed so terribly to be " upon
his dignity." Perhaps he found a greater tolerance
in the years after his book's publication. If not,
one can only think there is a great truth hidden
under that old nursery formula of Something to
Cry for Presently. This man who so persistently
had snivelled about details suddenly was struck
down by a serious blow.

Returning homeward in 1849, after ten triumphant
years, bearing with him his precious folios, a duplicate
of every portrait he had ever taken, he suffered
shipwreck off the coast of Guernsey, an old man

103

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

in his sixties, and lost all but a few of the countless
specimens that were to be his monument for ever.
Broken-hearted, he seems never to have practised
any more. The rescued folios, fourteen in all, he
gave to Frederica Lukis of Guernsey, who had been
kind to him. He died, this tragic comedian, in 1861.
Dickens would have loved him, and I sometimes
think there is in his life a novel ready for some lesser
hand.

Edouart is the most easy of all profilists to " spot,"
because he was consistent to one method. He cut
portraits in black paper. Apart from this, he usually
signed and he was generous with labels. Sometimes,
though not as a rule on his best specimens, he stamped
the name and date with a die-stamp — not very
dignified for one who spelt art with a capital. On
one in my possession he has written, after " Augn.
Edouart fecit. 1829," the full instruction : " No. Ill
Oxford Street, Entrance in Regent Circus." This,
however, the portrait of an elderly gentleman standing,
some way after Napoleon, on the sea-shore, is one
glorified with a hand-painted background, and the
artist probaoly would not here grudge a little extra
trouble. Of these painted backgrounds, and their
less expensive variant the lithographed, it is not easy

104

EDOUART

to say much in praise artistically, though of course
to the collector they are nice specimens, as rarer.
This sea-shore specimen is probably the most success-
ful, because it naturally involves a very low horizon.
Indoor scenes are frankly horrible, and their looped
curtains or sham-classic columns utterly ruin the
silhouette's effect. It is odd that Edouart, so stern
about gilt on the plain black shade, should have
encouraged this astoimding habit. In the course of
his remarks upon the bronzing of costume or hair,
which he nicely terms a harlequinade, " gold hair,
coral ear-rings, blue necklaces, white frills, green
dress," there occurs this passage : "It must be
observed that the representation of a shade can only
be executed by a shadow . . . consequently all
other inward additions produce a contrary effect. . . ,
Every artist or real connoisseur will allow with me
that when Nature is to be imitated, the least deviation
from it destroys what is intended to be represented."
Edouart undoubtedly was right as to the bronzing,
but it has always seemed to me that these remarks
might equally be used of his own painted back-
grounds. A silhouette is ex hypothesi the shadow
of a man seen with a strong light behind him. Edouart
usually, though by no means always, arranged the

105

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

background so that the figure stood against the
skyline or an open window, but by his own canon as
to Nature, one may fairly ask why in a room like
that upon pi. xx humans and dogs should seem a
dead-black shadow whilst walls and furniture remain
light brown. The best effect is certainly obtained
when he gummed the profile on a plain cream card,
omitting the elaborate backgrounds which he describes
as by " Artists, and I may say not inferior ones. . . ."

Edouart, moreover, cut full length. Certainly his
labels offer *' Profile Bust ; Is." but the figure was
perhaps considered his own speciality, for I have
only found two busts in my long silhouette-hunt and
only fifty occur among the new-recovered folios.
Indeed, on this point he is no less firm than about the
bronzing. " The figure adds materially to the
effect and combines with the outline of the face to
render, as it were, a double likeness." No doubt the
artist had an air, and I imagine that the scarcity of
head and shoulder portraits may be largely due to the
contempt with which he would receive an order for
the shilling bust. " Of course, madam, if you do
not wish to pay five shillings, but in my opinion the
figure adds . . ." and so forth, by the book !

It may be questioned whether he was wise, for

106

EDOUART

frankly anatomy is not quite his strongest point.
Or would it be fairer to say that the shadow treat-
ment will not brook foreshortening ? I own a truly
hideous signed Edouart of 1837, a seated man of
most chaotic shape, and even Mr. Connor, himself
a portrait-painter, admitted to me that the hind leg of
his beloved "Musician " is what the vet. would label
gummy. It is possible that Edouart's chief attrac-
tion to the full-length profile was in the fact that
it had been largely ignored by his great predecessors.
Certainly Rosenberg advertises full-length family
pieces, but I never met a specimen. Torond alone,
of the earlier profilists, seems to have loved the full-
length : and it is educational to compare his musician
(pi. xxix) with Edouart's (Frontispiece). Perhaps
" Art and Accuracy " may sum up the contrast.
Torond, indeed, was a master of decorative effect
and each of his compositions is a separate delight.

Where Edouart was quite supreme is in his sense
of character. This would account for his success in
studies of child-life (pi. xxiii). He had the first gift
of a portraitist : he could portray and explain in a
single illuminating moment. We know an Edouart
subject as we know a Sargent : the soul is there no
less than the mere shell. Edouart had a fine control

107

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

of the scissors, but he had more than that, he had
an eye for the important feature. None of his
portraits, it may be, fall definitely beneath the head
caricature, yet in many of them he good-humouredly
betrays the human weakness under an expression. In
his treatise there is a silhouette, " Checkmate," which
but for its printed background might be ranked ideal.
A genial old worthy, clinging still to the old-fashioned
perruque and resting his gouty leg on a convenient
footstool, leans back contentedly, a smile upon his
lips, and helps himself to snuff. Opposite this
self-complacent victor sits a younger man with very
worried look, who hangs a listless, indecisive hand
above the chess-board that nowhere shows a sign of
hope. This is a fine thing. Equally good is the
musician, happily absorbed in his own improvising
(pi. i) or the young undergraduate (pi. xviii) superb
in the calm confidence with which he holds his new
cap out to a world full of possibilities and rests easily
upon his beautifully shod feet. And almost better
is the portrait of " Mr. Liston in his Own Character "
(pi. xix), no doubt to distinguish it from one of the
actor in his famous part Paul Pry : "I hope I
don't intrude." Perhaps an expert might just cavil
at the backmost leg, but the spectator's eye is caught

108

EDOUART

first by the masterly roundness of feature, the easy
pose, the firm tackling of the hands, the whole
portrait's wonderful convincing, life-like quality.

Edouart was certainly unequal, but at his finest
he is incomparably the best of those who literally
cut profiles from paper in the nineteenth century.
With the delicate artistry of Mrs. Beetham on glass
or of Miers upon plaster he has no connection, and
therefore one need not compare him with those great
predecessors whom in his self-laudation he doggedly
ignored. Enough to say that he soared far above
his own contemporaries or any cutters who have yet
come after.

Besides portraits of chance callers, Edouart
achieved some fancy cuttings — ^the temptation of St.
Anthony, the murderer, street scenes, &c. — and also
advertised profiles of famous characters. This item
on his labels naturally explains the many duplicates
that still exist of anyone so popular as Dr. Simeon of
Cambridge, who was depicted in no less than ten
attitudes, many of them in the pulpit with hand
dramatically raised to emphasize a point.

Edouart also did groups and was particularly
proud of them. Here again he studiously ruled
out all except the bad among his predecessors, and

109

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

in his treatise gives a burlesque cutting of a " Family
in a Row," intended to sum up the group-work of
profilists before he himself arrived with his big A.
This cutting, dwindling in size from papa to the dog
(called Bijou), is certainly amusing but means less
than nothing. No doubt such horrors were per-
petrated daily in Edouart's own time, but profilists
of forty years before had taken groups that make his
stiff collections look like something by a feeble
amateur. That glorious Burney family of Mr.
Wellesley's, the family of Mrs. Wyatt's, how graceful
these and a score more appear beside those stilted
" natural " groups of which poor Edouart was so
intensely proud ! They sit beneath their curtains,
unashamed, at table, nor do they pretend to be all in
anything but the same plane. Edouart's people, a
full dozen often, make the absurd claim that they are
alive. They all indulge at once in ill-assorted pastimes.
One sews, another plays diabolo, a third holds
flowers ; the children romp with whip or hobby-
horse ; and baby sleeps uncomfortably upon a
pillow. Large ancestral portraits sometimes hang
in silhouette on the brown-painted walls. It is all
worrying, illogical, and ugly.

No need here to go into the ground upon which
110

EDOUART

Edouart based his claim to have revolutionized the
group in Silhouette. The easiest, if also the unkindest,
refutation of the fact itself will be to reproduce a
group of the best period and also — ^for let us be fair
even when we are unkind — one of the best Edouart
groups that I have so far found. The specimen
reproduced upon pi. xx is certainly far better than
that which Edouart himself chooses to illustrate his
high claims in the Treatise. That shows a wife and
husband with six children, each of the last in a
state of action near delirium. The two eldest play
La Grace, the next forges across the room with his
toy horse ; then one who stands upon a chair and
holds a morsel for the dog to snatch ; the three-year-
old is swinging her doll hectically ; lastly baby
climbs its mother like a Matterhorn and snatches at
her nose ; all this before a bleak window looped with
a balloon-like curtain. Compared with this, my
specimen has almost dignity. This is a superior
home, and Edouart (one guesses) felt in his own
element. One may imagine his small talk of even
more distinguished sitters as he ordained, with all an
artist's firmness, that the youngest daughter should
hold a flower up towards her stern elder, equally
cold to the dog's adoration. Why, this is 1831, only

111

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

one year after that great visit to the French Royal
Family ! The very signature seems bolder. . . .
In this amazingly large group, which measures two
and a half feet across, the brown stool and table are
cut out and gummed on to the card. Perhaps they
ranked as " extra cutting," but, going back to
Edouart's canon of Nature, it is possible to wonder
why one piece of furniture should be in black shadow
and another not. The fact is that this whole idea of
the brown painted room was an abomination. With
the figures themselves, as usual, Edouart has been
successful. The swagger of the boy-rider is delightful,
and one can hear the uncle, who believes in keeping a
lad in his place, retort: "Ah! but you should
have seen me. . . ." The mother's hair and nose,
I much regret to chronicle, have been touched up with
paint, each in a manner to improve her looks, and
here we must blame, not the stern scissor-loving
Edouart, but that vanity inherent in his subjects
which he so frequently laments.

Yet when all that can be has been said in praise of
each single figure, turn to the group upon pi. xxv, cut
by an amateur about five years before Edouart's
so-called renaissance, or to the beautifully formal
tea-party upon pi. xxi. This perfect specimen by

112

EDOUART

Torond belongs to Mrs. Alec Tweedie, and others
like it are in the collections of Mr. Wellesley and
Mrs. Wyatt. This table formula, in fact, was one
adopted by Mrs. Patience Wright and all the great
profilists of the eighteenth century, Torond, Gonord,
and that skilful amateur of the art, Goethe. Few,
I think, who duly look on this picture and that can
doubt that Edouart, however much he may have
improved upon the Family-in-a-Row formula that
he sets up as convenient skittles, fell very far indeed
behind his great predecessors in handling of the group.

Silhouette, in fact, is by its nature an art of
convention, and just as this great cutter could not
see that it would never express foreshortening in
single figures, so did he fail to realize that it was not
adapted to expressing various figures upon different
planes. His efforts to show distant people by smaller
size and a great sea of intervening carpet are seldom
convincing and never artistic.

Short of the seated-at-a-table formula, which
surely is pleasant enough in its formality, it seems
to me that if families must be taken together (and
it appears they must) some other of the older methods
is better adopted. I have already spoken of five little
heads on a protruding glass . The same idea was some-

113 H

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

times used on paper, and a specimen by Adolphe of
Brighton may be found on pi. xxiv. This is painted
in a blue-green tint that he affected, good work in
itself but of an even greater interest as document
in favour of heredity. Poor dear things ; the
girls especially, all doomed to papa's nose. I
often wonder how they all fared in the fight
with life. Mrs. Wyatt, who has a small collec-
tion of profiles in her treasure-house of early
glass near Worthing, owns a delightful and earlier
family (ancestral I believe), each member set in a
separate oval of the large brass-studded, papier
mach6 old frame, like that which holds the family,
probably by Field, on pi. xxviii. Another method,
quainter if less beautiful, is seen in Mr. Wellesley's
collection : parents and half a dozen children painted
inside eight tiny glass bosses, waxed at the back and
looking almost like round bullets in their wooden
frame.

Personally, at the risk of shocking those who set
no limit to clan sentiment, I incline to think that more
than two people never should be taken in one
silhouette. The early groups at table are charming
by very reason of their stiffness, and possibly excep-
tion might be made in favour of a fancy subject.

114

A HAND-SCREEN (xviil Century./"" *

EDOUART

Among my dearest treasures are, in fact, two
eighteenth- century screens painted with delicious
caricatures of beaux, belles, and beldams at a
dance and musicale respectively. Here I would have
not one figure less, and though a great deal has been
lost in reproduction, I cannot resist one of them,
pi. xxii, as proof of how delightfully a mass of figures
may be used without, like Edouart, attempting
the impossible : Reality. Equally, of later date, I
saw once in a shop the most colossal silhouette, all
gilt and brown, of probably the forties. A race-
course scene, with horses, jockeys, stewards, nota-
bilities, a perfect gem of its preposterous own kind,
and on its way to Germany. Poor England, all that
is worst in her was made in Germany, and all that
was best is swiftly making there ! Paris, Germany,
and the United States are quickly draining England
of its Georgian treasure, and soon — ^I do not doubt —
the day of the Victorians will come.

But I digress. . . .

Perhaps, before this lengthy chapter ends, some
mention should be made of the duets that strengthen
me in my heresy expressed. First, then, such
eighteenth-century delights as that which appears
in Lavater, or one of the same period belonging

115

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

to Major-General D'Oyly Snow : Sir Thomas D'Oyly
seated at a table lecturing his son who stands,
a candle set between them, underneath a formal
curtain. Then that of Beaumont on pi. xvi, to
which I have paid a full tribute in the proper place,
or a quaint group by Driscoll, before a painted
Dublin background, of a patrician who gives alms to
an old Jewish beggar with a dejected hound. And
lastly let the catalogue end with Edouart's tea-party,
dated 1826, and taken at 4 Colonnade, Cheltenham.
It may be said of Edouarts, in a catch-phrase, the
earlier the better; yet though this is among his
earliest, I am afraid its composition will not bear
comparison with the Sisters by Beaumont, one of those
profilists whose coloured work he so bitterly labelled
with the fine word " bigarrade.'*

Poor Edouart ! A man so terribly aware of slights,
despite the habit de toile dree of which he boasts, should
have adopted almost any other trade, or even stuck
to his hair portraits.

His was in many ways a tragic life, although its
sadness was as frequently home-made, but the last
act in his one authentic tragedy, the loss of his
precious folios, unrolled itself, oddly enough, but
lately. Mention has been made of a Lukis family in

116

EDOUART

Guernsey that gave hospitality to the poor ship-
wrecked profilist, as of a Frederica Lukis to whom
he gratefully presented such duplicates as had been
rescued from the sea. Nobody more remote than a
son of this Frederica suddenly appeared upon the
scene from Guernsey, like some magician gifted
with a time-machine, bearing with him — or offering
to bring — the fourteen long-lost folios ! This treasure
Mrs. Nevill Jackson was lucky enough to secure.
Over five thousand British portraits, taken chiefly
in Bath, Cheltenham, and Scotland, with scarcely
fewer taken in America, are here found dated, named,
and sometimes with an odd detail as to the sitter's
height or weight. In each case also there is a note
as to the place in which the portrait had been taken.
Through the kindness of Mrs. Nevill Jackson I am
able to reproduce a sample page (pi. xxiii). These
are the " Daughters of General Sir Ralph Darling,
8th Sept., 1836," and are named — from left to right —
" Miss Agnes Darling, 3 years : 3 ft. 2 in. Miss
Caroline Darling, 7 years : 4 ft. Miss Amelia
Darling, 4| years : 3 ft. 6 in." It was Edouart's
boast, by the way, that all his portraits after 1827
were true to military scale.

So early as 1835 he speaks of his gallery as
117

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

comprising above 50,000 likenesses ! Most profilists,
it will be gathered from the chapter upon " Labels,"
professed to keep the original shades — will time
finally yield the treasure of Miers' duplicates ? — ^but
Edouart clearly possessed a genius for system.
The name of each sitter was entered in five different
places ! Not to be outdone, Mrs. Nevill Jackson
has compiled an alphabetic list of the five thousand
names found in these British folios, and slowly no
doubt the portraits will filter back into the homes of
their originals' descendants. This, one likes to
think, will be as balm to the soul of too sensitive
Edouart, which must have suffered agonies in those
late Victorian days when silhouettes were being torn,
burnt, thrown away on all sides and their frames used
for Christmas Nvimber presentation plates. So after
all we may ring down the curtain on a happy ending.

118

5^x5

.sv' '

'", >

; \

'"'

-J

"i \ "^

c/3

$ ■ i

v: ^'

- : i

-V ^ ~J

•^\'-^

1---

■ « •' "^

f ""

V?-

w •>''•

;.rx""

^•s ^

ODFID AXD
aLBOCETTE

CHAPTER VI

CUPID AND SILHOUETTE

Silhouette should certainly have been called the Art
of Love, had not Ovid long since turned that pleasant
title to a baser use.

For, after all, what product of man's handicraft
should Cupid smile upon more naturally ? Hung in
auspicious pairs, they breathe romance, these little
shadows, and the sound of long-past but undying kisses
rises from them in the night. Businesslike collectors
weed out ruthlessly : " a pair of Fosters — yes, the man
bad but the girl worth keeping " : shattering for ever
who shall say what ancient vows or separating may-be
young hearts which a cruel world had joined but
once — upon a secret visit to the profilist's. These
are no chance pairs that come down to us nor are
they always man and wife. They are as often
Cupid's gage ; and who are we to separate the two ?
The lover of his treasures can almost hear departing
visitors remark : *' What lovely things I yes, but one
or two terribly unworthy ! " And yet — yet he

121

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

remembers where he bought it, with what joy he
brought it proudly home, what happy days chng to
its ancient frame ; yet he remembers it has hung
for who shall say how long fronting that other shadow
upon which the profilist bestowed such better art. . . .
No ! if I see connoisseurs whose specimens are all
first class, I give whole-heartedly my admiration,
but I keep back my trust. They are not men, and
I dislike machines.

On, on, before I horrify with yet more painful tales
of soldiers and young damsels, swept on to tacks
opposite by a collector's whim, joined by no passion
of their earthly lives, yet linked so long in shadow-
land that the collector must not break asunder. . . .
These be the harrowing rewards of such as truly love
the shadows of dear people turned to dust ; most
intimate, most sentimental, of all symbols brought
down by the flood of time. Pass by with a sigh of
pity, reflecting each on his own beautiful delusions.

Cupid was present, so the old prints show, when the
first Grecian invented silhouette by tracing on a
wall the shadow of his dear one : and Cupid has been
present ever since. Adolphe, indeed, who came
from France to Brighton with his art, printed a long
rambling poem on his labels, entitled " The Origin

122

»^i^- -:-: y '

A FAMILY
Painted on one card by Adolphe, of Brighton.

CUPID AND SILHOUETTE

of Profiles." Apart from a passionate lyricism, its
chief point is an odd lack of full stops, so that for
my purpose it will be enough to quote the opening
words :

" ^Twas Love, Hwas all-inspiring Love. . . ."

This was a fact that those who cut fancy subjects
never had far from their minds. One of my earliest
specimens shows a large, white heart filled with
formal decoration ; and underneath a white-cut
lion which submits with natural boredom to be
garlanded by Cupids I find the following quotation :

" Love vaunts his universal Sway.
Earth, Sea, and Air his PowW obey.
Lard of the Lion Heart he reigns
And leads him bound in rosy Chains,
Meek as the Slave, with humblest Duty
To crouch before the Feet of Beauty. ^^

This is, no doubt, an amateur attempt, and here
Cupid is more at home than with the busy profilists
intent on their five shillings. To the methodical
collector amateurs are no more than a bugbear ;
they seldom sign, and if they do it is confusing ;
but after all, professionals are only amateurs accepting
money and much of the best in all art has been

128

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

achieved for love. Mrs. Leigh Hunt cut some
dehghtful portraits in white paper ; Lane Kelfe of
Bath, who painted a few charming silhouettes (pi. v),
was probably not a professional ; and I have lately
been allowed by the kindness of a descendant to see
a dozen profiles by John Philip, who took them in
Soho before 1793, where he died at the early age of
twenty-six. It may be said of these that they would
disgrace no professional and, being unsigned, vastly
puzzle any connoisseur. Painted for the most part
on a reddened card, the faces are of a dead black,
the hair sometimes touched in silver-seeming pencil
with all of Mrs. Beetham's fineness, and the whole
portrait has a fine virility of touch. All these have
under the bust an inked line parallel with the black
mass ; a formula of recognition. This is work in
the first rank, and would have been no whit improved
if he had taken money. . . .

Princess Elizabeth, George Ill's daughter, was
another amateur of real distinction, with this ad-
vantage that she was also an accomplished painter ;
and it may be said of her that she specialized largely
in Cupids of a delightful chunkiness and ending in a
solid base, like that which forms the seemly Finis to
this volume. Children were another favourite subject

124

CUPID AND SILHOUETTE

with her, and in 1796 " The Birthday Gift or The
Joy of a New Doll," was published. These pleasant
stipple engravings, with no special resemblance to
silhouette, were described as " from Papers cut by a
Lady," but there was no secret made as to their
authorship and they were dedicated to Princess
Amelia. The publisher of the volume was Tomkins
of Bond Street, who — ^further to illustrate the thesis
of this chapter — had in the previous year issued
" The Birth and Triumphs of Cupid, from Papers cut
by Lady Dashwood." The late Lady Dorothy
Nevill owned a priceless album of silhouettes cut or
painted by the Princess, with many portraits of her
Royal parents in it.

It is, in fact, in albums that Cupid and amateurs
alike may be found at their best.

Whenever any wise collector sees or hears of a man
mad about any other form of hobby than his own,
he says to himself, " There, but for the grace of God
knows what, go I " ; and so it is with me about
scrap albums. Give me the space and I confess
that I could revel in them. I should not limit my
ambitions with such gems as those possessed by Mr.
Wellesley, Lavater's own tome of heads in silhouette
and the delicious Schatzmann book of portraits

125

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

(1779-1789) within their printed borders ; I should
not even stop short at such quaint libri amicorum
as that of the Parry family in 1840, with languid
ladies painted on settees by Beaumont ; I should not
keep to books of merit, nor even bind myself to
silhouette ; nothing at all should be too humble or
too bad for me so long as it was individual, for if a
man notoriously puts half his soul into a first novel,
he sticks the whole of it into his scrap-book.

But back to our shadows. . . .

Of the fancy-subject albums, I have seen none more
charming than that owned by the Honourable Miss
Frances Talbot and made by a rustic kinswoman,
Laura MacKenzie, ninety years ago. Fashions
changed slow away from London, in those coach-
carried days, and they are thus willowy people with
all the charm of a century then past who comb their
hair or bathe their babies in this splendid scrap-book.
It is all cut-paper, several designs upon a page, and
every possible domestic scene is represented that
could give delight. In one, delightfully Gilbertian,
the elders play quietly at chess, whilst in a corner
the younger generation has a game of — cards !
One of Miss MacKenzie's beautiful cuttings, to be
recognized beyond mistake by furniture and faces

126

CUPID AND SILHOUETTE

no less than by style of cutting, came to me by some
devious route in a London shop, and it is reproduced
upon plate xxv ; a little problem in categories for
such as make distinction between silhouette groups
and "cut-paper." But in her book, as always, Cupid
is supreme. Again and again, beneath trees cut
with masterly precision, he is at his games. There
he is burning vast sackfuls of hearts in a great
cauldron, or — ^what need for ceremonial ? — on a
bonfire direct ; and when the charming damsel sits
at an old-world table to write to her swain, Cupid
is up at once upon the chair-back with his bow and
shoots her down without remorse.

Yet when I think of Cupid, Silhouette, and scrap-
books, my mind leaps to a most piquant contrast :
two which stand side by side in the small number
of albums that I allow myself.

One is of a glory I despair about setting upon
paper. Genteelly small, not half a foot across, it
has end-papers of a perfect mauve ; its chaste
morocco cover, glorious scarlet elaborately tooled
with gold, is by a binder " Opposite the Palace " ;
one cutting only is gummed on to each alternate
gilt-edged page ; and in it stands the coroneted
bookplate of Marguerite, Countess of Blessington.

127

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

No need to labour this. The point is clear. Imagine
for yourselves the utterly polite ennui with which
her ladyship's guests would survey her latest cuttings
and pass it on indulgently with a just murmured,
" Very pretty, dear. ..." And pretty, too, they
are ; cut in a dozen different colours, touched in
cleverely with ink, and shaded off more than once
towards the base with a dark water-colour. Dainty
maidens saluted by wonderful gallants with cocked
hat under arm ; rustic swains that dally under
trees ; harlequin up to his merry pranks ; children,
of course, at their work and play ; languid youths
reclining at angles on Recamier settees ; priceless
officers mocking a no less immaculate civilian or
bursting into a hot-blooded duel upon the next page
to scenes of sugary domestic bliss : it is all very
pretty, thoroughly accomplished, and above every-
thing genteel.

The other — what a sad figure it cuts by com-
parison ! Younger by many years, it yet looks old
and gloomy in its stamped black cover with the one
gold touch of " Album." The end-papers are of
unconvincing yellow. There is no binder's name,
no bookplate. But all this is redeemed, when one
begins to turn the pages, for here is the love-epic of

128

-J

i
<

<
I

X
H

CUPID AND SILHOUETTE

an honest sailor. Silhouettes of David Thomson
himself, his messmates on the good ship Griffon, but
more especially of Mary : these are what fill the
bool^ — ^and poems.

David was a poet. True, he did other things. I
am afraid he drank sometimes. He wrote indeed
not a few poems on that subject. " But first, I
should say to inspire me " (he writes in '41, when he
was at the hot -blood age of twenty), *' I took up a
bumper of hot," and ends his poem, written in de-
jection caused by absence, with this significant
admission :

" But not being much of a grumbler,
I thought it was better to stop,
So next time I took up the tumbler,
I finished it — every drop " —

an easy enough way of ending inconvenient in-
spiration. Three years later, in any case, David is
convinced — ^it may be by his liver — ^that drink was
a mistake, and writes a lyric finely entitled " Wine
Should be Used like Medicine." This is dated at
sea, January '44 ; but one may see that David kept
a broad mind still, for verse four of a March poem
lays down about the teetotal convert like himself :

129 I

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

" Besides, he gets so very thin,

Though his appetite's prodigious,
His bones come almost through his skin,
And then he's so religious.'*

It is, therefore, with a certain horror that we see
his June verses to be entitled : " The Amusement of
Drinking. ..." But I think there was no relapse,
for this, the last reference to the topic, ends :

** And if we don't our talents improve
{If it's true what the Bible tells us)
Our souls will go at their next remove
Wherever the Devil compels us."

No, we can pass on with an easy mind to the idyll.

Mary was a pretty girl, exactly his own age. She
was, in fact, a very pretty girl ; many silhouettes
bear witness to that fact, but more especially one
touched with gold ; and the heart of David, himself
no beauty, beat wisely true to her. At least, I
think it did. Certainly there is a poem to Lucy,
but of a venial nature. There is equally that other
to a lady unnamed, who on his travels has asked
for a poem and gets one which ends, " I think in
reward of my pains you should certainly give me a

130

CUPID AND SILHOUETTE

kiss." And yet more flagrantly in need of explana-
tion are the lines to Elizabeth in 1830, Elizabeth
whom he first met " Upon a fine autumnal eve,"
what mystic time "The moon was up, the sun
retiring," out at Beaumont Hill :

*' Since that time I often infancy behold

The valley on which I there gazed with thee.
I am almost sure that I hear thy voice
And see thy lovely form beside me. . . ."

Well, sailors are notoriously licensed as to that,
and after all, it is not till next year that he writes to
Mary :

" And in the visions of the night
Thy form alone I see.''''

Also a later David, revising the verses to Elizabeth,
has recanted with his own hand — or is it a forgery by
Mary's ? — and changed that word " lovely " to the
less bard-like *' dumpy."

And after all, you must read this album back-
wards, like a Chinee or woman, if you would get its
proper ending ; for inside the front cover, opposite
two profiles of the young lovers gazing in each other's

181

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

eyes, there is written simply, yet who can guess with
how much pride :

" To Mary,
from her Husband,
D. Thomson:'

182

LABELS

CHAPTER VII

LABELS

Labels may sound a dull and unprofitable subject,
yet in them liesj great magic for the silhouette
collector.

Imagine for an instant — parvis componere magna —
that the great artists or great miniaturists of the
eighteenth century had placed behind their work a
printed account of what they thought the chief
merit of their peculiar styles ! Right or wrong (and
seldom indeed is the artist a critic ... of his own
creations), such an opinion would be valued above
gold by any decent -thinking connoisseiu".

And this, in effect, is what was done by these dear,
simple, enthusiasts in the new Art of Silhouette. Full
of wondrous words to express the full mystery and
importance of what arrived in England with all the
decorous prestige of a classical accomplishment, they
pressed into a few printed words delicious synopses
of their skill, which have the rare though often
advertised distinction of being both instructive and

135

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

amusing. If few things could be more charming
than Master Hubard, with his wooden-looking cut-
outs, describing himself solemnly as " Papyrotomist,"
or Haines (of the Chain Pier) as a " Scissorgraphist,"
yet nothing at all could be more useful than that
Rosenberg, that master of cold outline, should describe
himself as deliberately working "in imitation of
stone." That one phrase, which seems more and
more inspired to anyone who studies the Bath
artist's work, raises to a virtue the lack of soft-
ness in it which easily might otherwise have seemed
a vice.

Moreover, even optimists have never denied the
claim of this world to be wicked, and already there
appear on all sides forgeries of an increasing merit.
They are getting their eye set, these fakers ; the
day of the rought cut-out will soon pass : specimens
on chalk " by " Miers, on glass " by " Rosenberg,
will trickle, I feel confident, ere long into the London
shops. Already one great antique gallery has sent
forth the pronouncement that no more specimens
will be bought without labels. These little printed
papers are going to become, in the new vogue of
Silhouette, what " marks " have been in the old-
china craze. They will be forged, no doubt, in time ;

136

A LADY,
Painted on card by Mrs. Beetham.

LABELS

but cost apart, this is a bigger enterprise than
skilful copying of a black head on chalk. Labels
and old frames — ^these are the fatal snags that lie
in the poor forger's track ; and these must be no
less the quarry set before all intelligent silhouette
collectors.

It is very well worth while, then, before proceed-
ing to the later humours of the Label, to consider
those used by the first great silhouettists and
see, as preachers say, what can be learnt from
them.

First lesson of all, perhaps ; that as with curio-
dealers, so it was with silhouettists. The most
superior put least in their shop window.

Mrs. Beetham was the very essence of superiority.
No need to look further than her dainty ladies and
ineffably genteel young men, the plain distinction
of her rose-wood frames, the costly splendour of
her gold and cream domed glasses, the decorous
white chalk behind. Had she but lived in this era
of hotels and cinemas, she must have called her
portraits likenesses de luxe ! And as the last
touch of superiority, desolating surely to her
rivals, she placed upon her engraved label merely
these words :

187

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

" Profiles

Miniature

Mrs. Beetham,

No. 27

Fleet Street.

1785."

These severe words were engraved amid a wealth
of flourishes recalling a different art. Calligraphy,
and dots forecasting Beardsley. At the four corners
are small heads in profile ; but on oval frames or
actual miniatures these were naturally sacrificed by
a ruthless snip from the scissors she no doubt
despised.

Unluckily, that " 1785 '* must not encourage
owners to believe they have the very date of their
pet specimens : it merely marks the printing of her
plate and occurs on all the labels I have ever found
of Mrs. Beetham at the summit of her fame.

Even the best of us, however, have oiu* pasts ; and
Mrs. Beetham, before she reached this glory of plaster
and gilt glasses, plied a humbler trade with portraits
painted upon card and even cut from paper. Three

138

LABELS

specimens in my possession, two beaux and a belle,
are delicately cut, ruffle and periwig in open-work ;
the black is seemingly applied with soot on a white
surface, to be gently handled ; details of hair or
dress are touched in lightly with a pencil, scarcely
to be noticed till the glass is removed ; whilst each
bust ends in that jagged line to which I have already
called attention in the more ambitious Beethams
(pi. iv). Upon the back of one beau and the belle
is a most curious label, too big — alas ! — for the small
pear- wood oval, so that much of it is lost. Enough
remains, however, to prove it as Mrs. Beetham's, and
lest any doubt should linger as to whether back-
boards and frames had not belonged to some quite
different silhouettes, old Sol — kindest of friends to
the collectors and worst foe to the dark-loving
faker — burning his way patiently through the thin
paper has left flawless profiles on the wooden
backing.

Behind these quite indubitable Beethams, then,
is found this fragment of a label :

(? By ap)pUcation, leagued with good nat{ural gifts ?)

(MRS.) BEETHA(M).

(has ena)bled herself to remedy a Dificulty, much

139

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

lamen(ted and)
universally experienced, by
PARENTS, LOVERS, AND FRIENDS,
The former, assisted by her ART may see their off-
spring in any part of the terraqueous Globe ;
Nor can Death obliterate the Featuers from their
fond Remembrance.

LOVERS, the POETS have advanced,

** Can waft a Sigh from Indus to the Pole.'*

She will graitfy them with more substantial, though

ideal

(inter)course by placing the beloved Object to their

view.
FRIENDSHIP is truly valuable, was ever held a

Max(im)
They who deny it never tasted its delicious Fruit,
or shed a Sympathizing Tear.
. . . that was so ENDEARING, nay RAVISHING. . .
. , . separations existed . . ."
MRS. BEETHAM will call into B (eing ?) . . .
{C cetera, as the learned say, desunt: and not to
be outdone in Classicism, I shall add : eheu !)

140

LABELS

Here is a very different Mrs. Beetham from that
austere lady who printed her new label in 1785 !
These lines which — but for their spelling — ^recall the
lyric grandeur of a world-famed fruit salt adver-
tisement, no doubt mark a period before the day
when Mrs. Beetham, woman and sentimentalist,
merged herself into Mrs. Beetham, artist and mere
painter of " Profiles in miniature. . . ."

Rosenberg, whose classical restraint would certainly
have led one to expect an equal reticence, was luckily
(as I have said) far more confiding even in his prime,
and his trade -label, found behind all the instances in
my collection, is quite a work of art. On top the
Royal Arms ; at bottom a scroll with emblems
armorial and masonic ; and in the middle, framed
within an oval wreathed by flowers :

By Their Majesties' Authority.

MR. ROSENBERG

OF BATH

Profile Painter

To their Majesties and Royal Family,
Begs leave to inform the Nobility and
Gentry that he takes most striking like-
141

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

nesses in Profile, which he Paints on Glass
in imitation of Stone that will never fade.

Time of sitting one Minute.

Price from 7s. 6d. to £l Is. Od. Family

Pieces whole lengths in various Attitudes.

N.B. Likenesses for Rings, Lockets,

Trinkets, and Snuff Boxes."

Time — price — varieties — ^method — ^and artistic aim
— ^Rosenberg is indeed the man for silhouette col-
lectors ; and with it all there is no loss of dignity.

Perhaps, of the bigger men, Miers allowed himself
most freedom as to trumpet-blowing. Upon his
Leeds label — a rarity that gives a thrill indeed, when
found, to the collector — ^there appear, severely
printed in an oval, these words :

*' Perfect likenefses in miniature profile
taken by J. MIERS, LEEDS, and reduced
on a plan entirely new, which preserves the
most exact Symmetry and animated ex-
prefsion of the Features much superior to
any other method. Time of sitting one
Minute. N.B. He keeps the original
Shades, and can supply those he has once
142

FRAMED MINIATURES ON IVORY
Signed, or labelled, 1 and 2 by Miers ; 3 by Mrs. Beetham. Actual size.

LABELS

taken with any number of Copies. Those
who have shades by them may have them
reduced to any size and drefsed in the present
Taste."

This final inducement to the unwilHng middle-
aged was also offered (be it noted) by a contemporary
Liverpool artist, Mrs. Lightfoot, an artist very similar
to Miers in method as in label ; and was, indeed,
more to be looked for from female subtlety. It is of
interest to note the word "taken," coolly appro-
priated later by photography from its defeated rival ;
also the word " Shade," which I should like to see
revived in place of the alien and unhistoric " Sil-
houette."

Beneath the oval there is seen this more modest
postscript :

" Orders (at any Time) addressed to him at LEEDS
in Yorkshire, will be punctually dispatched."

On a portrait of Burns' mother in the Wellesley
collection, Miers' address is given as " Lowerhead
Row, Leeds." Although this might seem to point
to an earlier address, it marks more probably a date
at which the profilist's fame had not spread even
across his own native city. Later, one does not

143

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

doubt, his thronged studio came to rank with the
glories of Leeds.

When Miers grew yet more famous and moved to
London, he increased the time of sitting to three
minutes and on the whole became less self-assertive,
for on his later specimens he merely claims to execute
" Likenesses in Profile in a style of superior excellence
with unequalled accuracy, which convey the most
forcible exprefsion and animated character even in
the very minute size for Rings, Broaches, Lockets,
&c. &c." (He is by now " Profile Painter And
Jeweller," at 111 Strand, London, " opposite Exeter
Change.")

It must at the same time be admitted that, speak-
ing broadly, the London Miers is not such jRne work
as the Leeds, if more elaborate and, in his later years,
commonly adorned with gold. No doubt, like all
silhouettists and some artists, he had, as his circle
grew, to bring into his studio " shades " of another
sort, and perhaps many a signed Miers (or anyhow
many a labelled Miers) has little enough else to do
with his own hand. On a fine woman's head, painted
in black on chalk with charming softness in the hair
and dress, framed with the pomp of a black and
gold glass — "a beautiful Miers," many an expert

144

LABELS

has said, seeing it on my walls — ^there is a label
thus :

" THOMAS LOVELL,

from Mr. Miers,

Profile-Painter, Jeweller, and Miniature

FRAME Maker,

32 Bread Street, Cheapside, London,

Engages to take Likenesses in Profile to

reduce and copy old Shades or Sketches

for Rings, Lockets, Frames, «&c. &c.

N.B. By preserving the original Draught

he can supply Duplicates without an after

Sitting.

Mourning Rings and every article in the
Jewellery line."

This is the only Lovell label I have ever seen, nor
does the name occur in Mrs. Jackson's list of sil-
houettists, but it is utterly beyond dispute ; and how
many shades by Lovell may not be masquerading
still as Miers' ? Perhaps there were other assistants,
too, who never blossomed out as being " from Mr.
Miers." And soon he had taken into partner-
ship, was proud to own it on his labels. Field, who
when working alone, described himself on a minute

145 K

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

oblong as merely : " Profile Painter, Jeweller, Seal
Engraver, &c.. No. 2 Strand, near Charing Cross,"
but added " To their Majesties, By Appointment."
Field mainly worked in black and gold, or black and
brown, frequently on card, and often signed under-
neath the bust. Upon the death of Miers, he em-
barked again, with a much fuller label that owed a
little possibly to his late partner, though he reduced
the time of sitting, which latterly had been five
minutes, to the old mid-period three.

It would be tedious to quote further. Charles
had a label — none too modest ; " the first profilist in
England " — but used it all too little. That of
another silhouettist is sufficiently curious to claim
some few lines more before I pass to the Victorian
excesses. Upon the silhouette of a girl, the Honour-
able C. Massy, roughly executed upon chalk, an oval
label with a decorative design bears the words,
amongst others: "... preserves ye most exact Sym-
metry and animated Expref sion of ye Features superior
to any other Method. . . . Reduces old Ones and
drefses them in ye present TASTE. . . . Set in
elegant gilt frames at 6*. 6d. only."

This archaic adapter of Miers* label worked in a
method largely similar, though with less delicacy,

146

A FAMILY, assigned to Field.
(Showing the large papier-mache frame.)

LABELS

bore the name I. Thomason, and practised at 83
Caple Street, Dublin. He was certainly working
at an early date ; describes himself in a newspaper
announcement of 1790 period as " from England " ;
and it is idle by now to dispute whether he or Miers
first evolved their common self-laudation. Rought
of the Cornmarket, Oxford, another eighteenth-
century exponent, backed his perruqued under-
graduates (painted on glass in stern lines and a
curiously deep black paint) with a design that would
not have shamed Bartolozzi. Torond of 18 Wells
Street boasted rightly to work " in the genteellest
taste." This very happily expresses the gentle
charm of several specimens that are among my dearest
treasures. In fact, these earlier advertisements
would form an interesting collection in themselves,
for anybody heartless enough to turn the silhouettes
face inward to the wall. . . .

It was, however, the Victorians who reduced labels
to their highest pitch — and their lowest absurdity.

Edouart, however puny he may look beside his
great predecessors, towered above the small men of
his day ; and in accordance with the shop-window
canon his label has a certain dignified reserve, as
thus :

147

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

" Likenesses in Profile, Executed by Mons.
Edouart, Who begs to observe that his Like-
nesses are produced by the Scissors alone,
and are preferable to any taken by Machines,
inasmuch as by the above method the expres-
sion of the Passions, and peculiarities of
Character, are brought into action, in a style
which has not hitherto been attempted by
any other artist. Numerous Proof Speci-
mens may be seen at Mrs. Bays's, Trinity
Street, Cambridge.

Full length — 5s. Od. Ditto, children under
8 years of age — Ss. 6d. Profile Bust — 2*. Od.

Attendance abroad, double, if not more
than two Full Length Likenesses are
taken.

Any additional Cutting, as Instrument,
Table, &c. &c. to be paid accordingly."

The last item is instructive. With it in mind, one
tends — on looking round a wall of Edouarts — to rate
the all too often unnamed sitters by the amount of
furniture around them. That young man, who
always until now had been a favourite, stands forth
in this new snobbish light as a mere tyro shivering
upon life's bottom rung, and painfully unable to

148

\/Xk

MR. STERN AT THE SPINET
Painted by Torond

LABELS

afford (tempt Edouart never so wisely) table or
instrument or even his own hat in hand. . . . And
that old gentleman, who always seemed so dull and
podgy, gains fresh importance, for behold he sits
(an extra, this we know from Edouart's own book)
upon a chair with table, three books, top-hat, and
a vase before him, whilst (down on your hams, ye
snobs !) the ciu-tained window, with seascape com-
plete, is no less than hand-painted !

As to the cost of this last no label that I have yet
found will throw any light. Other facts emerge
from some : a bust was frequently one shilling only
(possibly in poorer towns than Cambridge, or those
with less gilt youth about), and duplicates were
roughly at half-price ; but nowhere can one learn
exactly how much Dives spent on his hand-painted
room, what poor young Lazarus had saved by stand-
ing chastely on a chill white card, or the precise
social and financial position of those who vaunted
themselves in a stiff lithographed apartment.

On the back of a silhouette that shows a girl beside
a large stone vase (no doubt an " instrument " and
"paid accordingly," in the grim formula), and in
front of a lithographed terrace with a river-prospect,
there is a very interesting label. It was, in fact,
for this that I bought the specimen, which is in

149

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

Edouart's worst manner. This last fact has not
deterred him from both signing and adding an
imposing label in circular form. At top there stands
in silhouette the Royal Arms, at bottom a portrait
of the King with crown and olive-wreath, whilst up
the two curves run extended scissors, which look at
first sight much more like so many pairs of spectacles.
Amid all this, at various angles, may be found :

"Taken with scissors only.
Silhouette likenesses under the Special Patronage
of H.R.H. the Duke of Gloucester.
MONSIEUR EDOUART.
Full Length Standing 5.0. Duplicates 3.0.
do. Sitting 7.0. do. 4.0.

Children under 8 years of age 3.6. do. 2.6.
Busts 2.6. do. 1.6.

Full lengths taken from busts,
or description of absent or deceased persons.
The likenesses taken in Five Minutes.
Frames at Manufacturers' Prices.
Orders sent, with Cash for the amount, Post
Paid, to Mr. John Mc. Rae, 155 Cheapside,
London, Agent to Mons. E., will be attended
to immediately."

150

LABELS

And underneath the royal bust appears : " Sil-
houettes of Celebrated Characters, 35. each." This,
I have said, is informative, as it explains the count-
less duplicates of Dr. Simeon and other popular
divines. Another sentence, " Taken with the scissors
only," may be tardily commended to such dealers
as have in their extensive showrooms painted or
gilt specimens " by " Monsieur Edouart. ... It
is to be remarked in passing that Edouart, having
grown from Mons. to Monsieur and got a London
agent, to say nothing of a royal patron, has sensibly
increased his prices ; and the fact that the silhouette
in front of all this pomp is feeble must not encourage
to an easy cynicism. Let us pronounce it a coin-
cidence ... or say that Edouart, like Rosenberg,
was at his best with males ; the penalty in each case
of a method so severe.

Edouart probably obtained the highest fees at this
time, although, of course, the earlier masters had
received far more and even then got much less than
their foreign rivals.

Certainly Master Hubard, who was cutting in the
twenties, made no extravagant demands, so far as
money went. " A strikingly correct likeness," he
assures his patrons, " with a frame and a glass, for

151

kTHE ART OF SILHOUETTE

one shilling, can invariably be relied on at the
Hubard Gallery."

So far, so good ; but one must not place too much
reliance on the later statements of this label, which
is found behind a full-length portrait of James Lee,
a middle-aged man in full riding kit ; possibly a
coachman and offered to me (like many others) as a
Wellington :

"The curious and much admired Art of
cutting out likenesses with common scissors
(without drawing or machine) originated in
this establishment in 1822. Master Hubard
was the ibst youth known to possess the
extraordinary talent of delineating Profile
Likenesses with Scissors, and his works, con-
sisting of Military, Architectural, and other
subjects, are still considered the finest
specimens of the Papjrrotomic art.

As the originator of this New and Curious
Art, Master Hubard was in 1823 presented
with an expensive silver Palette by the
Glasgow Philosophical Society, and by that
Society his Exhibition was first designated
the HUBARD GALLERY.
152

LABELS

As the * Nursery of Extraordinary Ju-
venile Talent,' the Hubard Gallery has since
been universally known in all the principal
towns in Gt. Britain, Ireland, the United
States, and the Canadas."

It would be presumptuous, no less than useless,
to cross swords at this time of day with the Glasgow
Philosophical Society (which anyhow had quite a
pretty taste in names) ; but if Master Hubard
originated cut-paper portraits in 1822, there does
arise a quite philosophic doubt, which even the
G.P.S. need not have despised, about explaining the
countless earlier examples. Perhaps it was this
feeling that caused the lad (who must soon have
grown into a Company, one would suppose, so many
specimens did he produce) to use this high-flown
label seldom and be content with a mere stamp-
relief, " taken at the Hubard Gallery," or sometimes
even the two last words alone. This is a big drop
from the earliest days of all where his silhouettes
were ** cut with common scissors without drawing
or machine by the celebrated Little Boy, Master
Hubard."

Master Hubard's claim, however, was quite in

153

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

accordance with the spirit of his age. Any sil-
houettist who hid his Hght beneath a bushel might
have got snugly underneath with it, himself as well,
for all the good that he would do. Already the
proud " artist " was sinking to a loud-voiced show-
man. Soon his " Gallery " would be a draught-
swept shanty on a pier. . . .

Meanwhile, therefore, Skeolan must warn all and
sundry that he was making a " short stay " ;
announce that his profiles were " faithful, elegant,
and characteristic " (this at the back of a most
wooden group) ; " the best ever seen in Halifax " —
no less ; and drop only at the end to saying that
" accuracy " would be guaranteed ; Haines must
practise his " scissorgraphy " ; Gapp (also of the
Chain Pier) make it obvious that he has " no con-
nection with any other person," is in the " Third
Tower," and will there (apparently) do " Ladies and
Gentlemen on Horseback, 75. 6d.," " Single Horses,
5s." or " Dogs, Is. 6d.," all likenesses being " most
wonderful " ; whilst Liverpool, never to be left
behind, produces Dempsey who reminds " Emi-
grants, Travellers, and the Public," that the new
penny postage " offers a safe and cheap method " of
sending mementoes, which he is willing to supply on

154

LABELS

terms the moderateness of which clearly causes him
a pain to be worked oil only by a crescendo of
exclamation marks : " Likenesses in shade, Sd. !
Bronzed, 6d. ! ! Coloured, Is. Qd. ! ! ! " Alas ! there
is (without the exclamation marks) that most signifi-
cant of notices : " And upwards " : a postscript still
familiar on trays of curios ''All at Five Shillings."

Well, they are dead now, all these dear simple
men ; nothing is left of them except the shadows
that they cut and their pretentious claims ; but they
all did their best, leaving behind them much that was
curious or good, nothing — ^no man of them — ^that
could do harm to anyone ; and may we other artists
have no less to claim when we make up our labels
for our life-time's judgment !

155

VIII
SOME COLLECTIOISS

CHAPTER VIII

SOME COLLECTIONS

It is commonly admitted that whilst envy in itself
must be ranged among the vices, it leads the way to
enterprise, ambition, energy and other virtues.
Perhaps therefore I am ethically justified in taking
my public a brief tour around some of the most
notable collections.

Every one knows the State Rooms at Knole, that
wonderful mansion which clutches greedily the
wealth of a dozen museums in its old rambling
galleries : peerless corridors of Jacobean furniture ;
pictures by Lely, Reynolds, Gainsborough ; needle-
work, carving, silver ; everything beautiful that
the industrious past has handed down to its most
favoured children : but few are possibly aware that
in the great house's private wing there is one room
devoted solely to a more modern art, the art of
Silhouette. This is the home of Lady Sackville's
own collection ; partly inherited, partly bought,
partly given by kind or less appreciative friends.

159

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

The room may be described as a harmony in black
and white. Everywhere are silhouettes: pictm-es,
ornaments, and china. On the jugs and basins is an
effective pattern introducing medallion silhouettes,
wherein I seemed to recognize Queen Alexandra,
Lord and Lady Sackville themselves, together with
two ancestresses, the Duchess of Bedford and
Countess of Derby, whose profiles are adapted from
authentic silhouettes now hanging on the walls.
When the room is occupied by any visitor there is
brought in a morning tea-service of the same unique
design, whilst even paper-stand and blotter bear
fine-cut subject silhouettes, which I think from their
style may safely be attributed to Wilhelm Miiller.
The whole room is an original idea superbly carried
out.

As to the collection proper, pressed for a single
adjective I should describe it above all things as
imcommon. By this I must not be read to mean that
it is in any way a freak collection, but rather that
whilst keeping to silhouettes of quality and value
it yet steers free of all the most familiar names It
may be that there are specimens by Mrs. Beetham,
Rosenberg, and Miers; one Edouart I certainly
remember ; but for the most part I recall it as a

160

5
o

Q
Z

XXX.

SOME COLLECTIONS

fascinating gallery of gems to which, off-hand, one
would be hard pressed to set an artist's name. Some
splendid specimens in black and gold stand gaily
out in a sidehght, one signed *' Coog, 1789," another
showing a black portrait on gold set within a silver
urn. This is unsigned but bears the legend, " Penspz
k moi, 1812." A few Continental portraits in printed
borders, one signed " fait par Joubert, peintre en
miniature," catch the eye by their bold outlines.
Others, English, attract no less by reason of their
delicacy. Quite the most charming and unusual
of these last is the large full-length portrait of " the
last Lord Fauconberg." Beneath a looped curtain
there sits reading a perruqued young man in uniform.
Table, chair, ink-pot, everything is as perfect and
distinguished as himself. His cocked hat lies before
him on the table, and gazing up at him in helpless
adoration is a depressed hound, apparently conscious
of being the least well-bred thing in the tableau.
This beautiful specimen of a full-length figure-study
is signed by Wellings, who worked in England
around 1785 but was not always so happy in his
work as here. Specimens by Foster or Spornberg,
even red-coat soldiers, however representative, lose
a little of their glamour beside anything so beyond

161 L

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

the usual as this or as the delicious advertisement
of a silhouettist which hangs beside the bed. Three
women and a man, their hair dressed in the style of
somewhere around 1800, fill oval niches in a black
square whereon is inscribed, " Profiles taken here
at 2. 6. each."

But it is time now to look at the china, a depart-
ment in which Lady Sackville may rate her collection
almost peerless. The pen of a china-expert would be
needed to describe properly the vases, tea-cups,
bowls, nor do these specimens fall strictly in my
scope for they display another art. One thing,
however, is of interest here : the freedom with
which George III appears. George was of course
a glutton for silhouette, and here we have him upon
stately Worcester vases over a foot high, bearing
such legends as *' An honest man's the noblest work
of God," and also upon smaller mugs with much
less flowery mottoes. One of these, still seen about
in shops, seems almost modern in its familiar laconism :
" Happy Jubilee, 1809. . . ." This is different indeed
from the Shakespearian inscription underneath
another portrait of his Majesty in Lady Sackville's
silhouette room :

162

SOME COLLECTIONS

" May he live,
Longer than I have time to tell his Years !
Ever helov'^d, and loving, may his rule be !
And when old Time shall lead him to his end,
Goodness and he fill up one Monument ! "

But far the most pleasant memorial to George III
at Knole is in another place. Up in the George III
room, hangs a curiously interesting silhouette of
both the King and Queen. They face each other,
white busts engraved on a small mirror. This is the
work of " Mr. John Pye, apprentice, born 1753," and
very fine it is. Sometimes, I think John Pye must
wish that it might take its chance among the shadows
in that other room.

Mrs. Bromley Taylor is another collector who has,
so to speak, concentrated upon Silhouette, but in her
case it is a London drawing-room that is the shrine
of shadows. Cleverly arranged, with smaller frames
grouped round the long full -lengths, and one wall
varying the scheme by beautiful Lucas wax-heads,
the room is effective, individual, and suprisingly
free from any suspicion of freakish eccentricity.
Convincingly natural, it fills the first duty of any
room by expressing the owner's personality. Mrs.

163

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

Bromley Taylor is a real enthusiast on Silhouette
and one of the pioneers in that collection. She
has bought always more with the eye of an artist
than with the sordid back-thought of a connoisseur,
and if this has perhaps limited the value of her
collection, it has probably increased its charm.
Names and labels, what are they, to any normal mind,
beside a grace of decoration ? Mrs. Bromley Taylor
has some splendid specimens by Miers, Foster, and
the other masters, but she has bought them for them-
selves, not for the names they bear, and who shall say
that she is wrong ? Certainly there is no name or
label on the choicest of her miniatures, tiny profile
heads of Napoleon and Josephine, black and gold on
glass, surrounded by an ornamental border, but only
a museum pedant could think worse of it for that.

Personally, though I cannot deny the effectiveness
and charm of these two black-and-white rooms, I
confess that I best love my silhouettes in a stiff
line above the mellow gold of an old mirror, or hung
in a festoon round colour-print and pastel. Picture
and silhouette both seem to gain new value from
their contrast. And when — as happens — ^the ever-
increasing profiles begin to give the walls an oddly
chicken-pox appearance, here is an expedient that

164

SOME COLLECTIONS

I believe original and know from my experience to
be effective. Take an old mirror (for this is no less
than a recipe) of the long, low-lying sort known as
a three-decker — one of those dim gold affairs, a
large glass in the centre flanked by smaller glasses
at the sides, with ever so respectable gilt balls beneath
the overhanging cave — ^and heartlessly remove the
glasses. Now in their place fix three wood panels
covered with velvet of a restful, ancient -seeming
green. The thing sounds horrible, the desolation
of Victorian abomination ; but when small silhouettes,
especially the early ones in oval frames of brass, are
hung within the panels tactfully, believe me the
effect is charming. A centre-piece has come for the
collection, and the walls meanwhile are ridded of
their plague of spots.

No such expedient can help the silhouette collector
who works upon the scale of Mr. Francis Wellesley,
but he has grappled happily with this aspect of his
wonderful collection. True, in the drawing-room
of his Surrey home there is a bulky chest full to its
limit with specimens that other connoisseurs might
struggle to possess, beautiful signed specimens in
fine frames lumbered pell-mell without any order ;
but those thought worthy to be shown are most

165

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

effectively displayed. To the countless people who
believe silhouettes to be black cut-paper portraits in
Victorian frames, Mr. Wellesley's dining-room might
prove an almost dangerous shock. Nothing more
handsome, nothing finer, can well be imagined than
the massed effect of black and gold in the silhouette
trophies (for I can find no better word) that Mr.
Wellesley has hung between his beautiful old oils.
Nothing is admitted here but what its artist thought
worthy of a gilt-glass setting. Specimens by Miers
or by Mrs. Beetham, gems every one, are hung in
great bunches that might be expected to kill their
individual worth, but actually succeed in lending
value to each other. Not in the whole room is there
one cut silhouette, all is chalk or glass ; and here
it was that the Victoria and Albert Museum made
the greatest inroad when Mr. Wellesley promised
lately to loan a part of this collection, which he and
ftis wife, equally enthusiastic, have gathered together
from almost every part of Europe.

Next door, in the smoking-room, silhouette holds
its own amply with the wonderful early plumbago
drawings, which are Mr. Wellesley's new hobby,
even with his marvellous show of miniatures by all
of the accepted masters ; but this is not surprising,

166

WILLIAM PITT. 1788
In black and gold, on glass, by Fepk.

(In the possession of Francis Wellesley, Esq.)

SOME COLLECTIONS

for here again are no late Georgians or Victorians,
nothing but fine specimens by Rosenberg and his
compeers, fine instances of all the Continental pro-
filists, together with such curious examples as have
already been referred to in these pages. This comes
close indeed to being a room of pure silhouette, but
it is restful to the eye as well as being a delight to
the collector's soul. All over the house, indeed, one
may find traces of the hobby, though Mr. Wellesley
is of course a man by no means of one fixed idea.
That a connoisseur of such world-famous taste should
have relapsed on Silhouette is in itself indeed sufficient
answer to those who sniff contempt at the whole art
of shadows. Enough to say that Mr. Wellesley's
most cherished Downman, his most priceless minia-
ture, does not seem out of keeping with, or any way
superior to, the choicest of his silhouettes. The
whole place is an harmonious treasure-house.

In the drawing-room no silhouettes are hung, so
far as I remember, but china keeps up the tradition —
Worcester tributes to George similar to those at
Knole ("More dear to his subjects," *' Mercy and
Truth preserve the King ") ; Meissen china in black,
gold and blue ; Dresden, showing Goethe and his
circle, black, gold, green, and blue ; Furstenburg
, 167

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

plaques, kings and princesses dated 1786, surrounded
by gold rims — ^whilst in a glass-faced cabinet is
arranged his gallery of jewelled miniatures in silhou-
ette. Here, often in the rarest settings, you may
see tiny gems by Mrs. Beetham, Rosenberg, and
Miers ; double lockets breathing their romance ;
patch-boxes with the shadow of their owner on them ;
Smart the miniaturist painted by Mrs. Beetham ;
curious red miniatures by Spornberg ; a Field on
ivory, the smallest silhouette to be possibly imagined ;
rings holding women with a coloured dress, and
innumerable perfect specimens by continental artists.
So far as connoisseurs go, " seldom comes glory till
a man be dead." Mention silhouettes, the average
dealer and most auction-goers will refer to the late
Montague Guest and his historic sale at Christie's.
But when the Francis Wellesley sale comes — ^long
hence may it be ! — a sleepy world will rub its eyes to
find that a greater connoisseur has all the while been
in their midst. Mr. Wellesley cannot perhaps claim
to have been among the first of silhouette collectors,
but he has made himself the greatest. Almost all
the Guest collection is at Westfield, and forms a very
small part of a far greater whole. Mr. Wellesley,
as though he felt that his silhouette collection had

168

SOME COLLECTIONS

reached its zenith, has lately published a luxurious
volume of " One Hundred Silhouette Portraits
selected from the Collection of Francis Wellesley,"
with a preface by Weymer Mills. Only a hundred
copies of this book, beautifully printed by the Uni-
versity Press, Oxford, have been issued, and these
will repose largely in the principal museums. No
finer catalogue of silhouettes is ever likely to be
published, and I think myself very fortunate indeed
to be, by Mr. Wellesley's generous thought, the
owner of what must always rank among the rarest of
treasures for future silhouette-collectors, nor less to
be allowed the use of some blocks from the catalogue.

Lest the bare mention of so many gems beyond their
reach should depress the neophytes no less than
sauntering through a museum, I may possibly
stretch the title of this chapter to include a few hints
on " What to Collect."

Mr. Wellesley, be it said at once, is in the eighteenth
century, or not much after. He scorns Victorians or
late Georgians, and this is a field therefore easy of
access to later or less favoured connoisseurs.

One might in fact draw up a rising scale for any
would-be silhouette collector. First and lowest
would come (in the glorious vernacular) any old

169

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

black thing. Those with no higher ambition should
first, however, read the passage upon forgeries in a
later chapter.

Secondly, we should attack signed or labelled late
Georgians and Victorians : Master Hubard, Frith,
Field, Herve, Beaumont and their kidney ; with
Edouart and Foster as our highest good. This
should still be an easy collection for anyone with
energy and time.

Next in the rising scale would come eighteenth
century unsigned. Here the perruque or piled
head-dress would serve as our hall-mark.

Lastly, for those of overpowering ambition, the
eighteenth century, signed, labelled, and in the
authentic frames. Miers, Rosenberg, Mrs. Beetham,
Spornberg, Jorden, Charles, Thomason, and Hamlet
— such for the most part will be their narrow list of
possibles, unless they branch out into the innumerable
artists who worked in Germany, Russia, and France.
Such, too, is the hard way that I have set myself in
future.

Of course, however, in between these obvious
grades we may find possible collections full of interest.
Silhouette prints, for instance. A chapter, nay a book,
could easily be written about these. Apart from

170

AN OFFICER OF THE GUARDS

Painted on paper in Regimental Colours.
(In the possession of Francis Wellesley, Esq.)

SOME COLLECTIONS

countless prints displaying a sure method of taking
profiles, or all those flabby classic couples who
illustrate in stipple the Origin of Silhouette, there are
delightful frontispieces to innumerable volumes.
Plump Edward Gibbon with his snuff-box (from
his quarto edition, 1796); Dr. Keate with pupil-
terrifying stride ; naval captains who had suffered
shipwreck ; above all, clergymen who published
sermons — such are but a few of those who accepted
the profilists' offer to provide suitable frontispieces.
Some of these are crude indeed and with delicious
legends. Politicians, again, and popular preachers
attained the fame of separate silhouette prints sold
like mere broadsides. In the Victoria and Albert
Museum Print Room may be seen prints of Lord
Brougham (inscribed, " I see, sir, I see, it comes to
this "), Earl Grey with Reform Bill on table before
him, Lord John Russell and Daniel O'Connell,
published by I. Bruce, who also issued a familiar print
of Wellington, his legs up on a chair. Among frontis-
pieces the palm must go to the beautiful portrait of
Robert Burns by Miers, but the high-water mark
of a purely silhouette-print collection would be in
the fine aquatints issued by Colnaghi. An equestrian
George III, a duplicate of which hangs fittingly in

171

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

the Pavilion at Brighton, is inscribed : " This like-
ness of the most excellent and venerable Majesty
King George III, in the fiftieth year of his reign ..."
by Charles Rosenberg, engraved by Stadler, October 1,
1810. It is, of course, in colours except for the face.

Some of the best prints would be obtained from
books, and anyone with a stern conscience might prefer
to be a book-collector. Here the rarities would be
Edouart's " Treatise," already described, and such
kindred volumes as Barbara Anne Townshend's " Art
of Cutting out Designs In Black Paper," of which
Mr. Wellesley owns a copy. But others more within
the general reach would be Konewka's " Midsummer
Night's Dream " (Longmans, 1868) or " My Young
Days " ; Albert Smith's " Rasperl " (issuing oddly
from the Egyptian Hall); the books with frontis-
pieces above mentioned ; and above all Lavater
in the big quarto edition. The later octavo edition,
published 1789, omits the big plate showing the
method of taking profiles, as also the large full-length
plates, which under initials hide (I believe) Madame
de Stael and George Stubbs, R.A. These in them-
selves are beautiful, but the comments of Lavater are
still better. From the mere shadow he will dogmatize
on anybody's soul. His kindly delineation of his own

172

SOME COLLECTIONS

profile in particular must bring refreshment to the
weariest mind, and — as a sample of his quality — about
the charming silhouette of Mr. Stubbs, R.A., and a
boy, he has these naive remarks :

"Here we are presented with a man arrived at
maturity and a most promising youth, though in
silhouettes of the whole figure the effect of the light
always injures the clearness and accuracy of the
profile " (this would shock Edouart), " it will however
without hesitation be admitted that the principal
figure has a character of wisdom, and that the young
man discovers hopeful dispositions. . . . The sil-
houette of the grown man is much inferior to the
object which it represents. . . . The youth . . . will
have to combat with caprice and obstinacy. I love
him nevertheless with all my soul, though I have
never seen him and know nothing of him."

Two pages earlier, having prophesied — ^from the
profile — great things of another youth, whom I
suspect to be his son, he ends : " If he disappoint
that expectation, farewell to physiognomy."

Lavater's " Physiognomy " is indeed a book that all
silhouette collectors must possess. Apart from its
generous supply of silhouettes — Frederick of Prussia,
the inevitable George, and many other men of note—

178

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

it holds a long and charming appreciation of the art
from one competent to judge.

A third possible collection (for space demands a
bald economy of words and I am tempted to a chapter
upon each) would be quite broadly " Paper-work."
This ambitious heading would include those subject
silhouettes that have been dealt with in another
essay ; all such portraits as are actually cut, pin-
prick pictures, and those fascinating boxfuls of
rolled-paper that hang upon the wall and throw a
ray out from the golden edges of their dim elaborate
castles — a field wide enough for even the most rabid
buyer.

Much more difficult would lie the path before a
fourth collector, who should concentrate upon the
black and gold glass pictures. First of all the
portraits, French or English, profiles in the fullest
sense, such as that of Pitt upon pi. xxxi, but then
diverging to groups that still might be termed
silhouettes (a long array of glorious gold students
of astronomy against a dead-black background is
signed with the name Belluti), and so on to ambitious
subjects having no such possible pretension but
getting nearer to the genus of glass picture. This
collection, interesting and full of decorative merit,

174

FREDERICK OF PRUSSIA.
Is. Johnson del. Aiderton suff.

(Size of original. 1 5-in. x 1 2.)

SOME COLLECTIONS

would involve departure from the patriotic stand-
point of No Foreigners (always, of course, unless they
worked in England!). Two of the finest I have
found — fierce hunting scenes with silver hares pursued
by golden hawks against a leaden sky — ^are signed by
Rudolph, 1794.

Lastly, for an age that worships the ugly and
mistrusts prettiness as inartistic, there might be
a freak collection ; the oddest items from all the
above possible collections. Puzzle-prints, where
silhouetted heads of Buonaparte and family are
found in violets ; Victorian abominations with real
clothes upon them ; toy-books where the figures
move and leave shadows behind, the barrister a parrot
but the girl a puss ; everything odd that could be
bound up with a dainty art. Here the most pleasant
items certainly would be such a " mixed " item as
the fine portrait of Frederick the Great, pi. xxxiii,
half silhouette and half calligraphy, or those shadow-
cuts which only throw the silhouette when held
between white paper and a concentrated light. Up
to the present I have found nobody who could explain
the origin or object of these ingenious precursors
of the magic lantern. Lady Dorothy Nevill, who
must always rank as the first collector of so-called

175

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

cut -paper, had many fine examples of this curious
art, some by Princess Elizabeth, daughter of George
III, who had profile-mania in the blood. Lately
in a bookshop I bought an early collection at one
swoop ; many of them copied from such familiar
prints as " Comedy " or " Tragedy " ; and the
effect is quite incredible. No name or date is on
them, but some of the portrait subjects — (Napoleon,
Britannia weeping over Princess Charlotte's tomb,
George IV, Miss Stephens, Kean, Cooke, Mrs. Siddons,
Mrs. Egerton as Meg, Mrs. Johnstone in Timour
the Tartar, Erskine, Kitty Fisher) — indicate the
period sufficiently. The most astounding fact about
these shadow-cuts is the effect of roundness which
is given to a face or figure. Unhappily there seems
no way of framing them to show their merits, nor
does a reproduction of the original (pi. xxxiv) give
any hint of the shadow's effect though it displays
the amazing skill necessitated in the cutter.

I have it in me to hope that, even if some are urged
to start on shadow-cuts (they may see some of
average quality in the Victoria and Albert print
room, Townshend Bequest), no one may seriously start
the freak collection. Notoriously, though, you never
can be sure, and honesty bids me to say that any

176

THE PRINCE REGENT (GEO. IV.)
Shadow or negative silhouette to be held between light and paper.

SOME COLLECTIONS

such collector will strike a rich lode in Smart of
Frant, near Tonbridge Wells, who flourished around
1820. Smart as a young man started tailor, but soon
he was an "Artist"; cutter— duly "to" a Royal
Highness — of velvet-clothed and leather-gaitered
people on a painted background, the whole adorned
with spangles and backed by a printed poem wherein
he compared himself naturally enough with Rubens,
Aristotle, and some more of the best people.

There are many things even within the narrow
radius of Shadow-art that nobody collects as yet. . .

Messieurs, faites vos jeux !

177

IX
'CUT PAPER '

CHAPTERJIX

"CUT PAPER"

Our judicial humorists at sundry recent times
have amused their public and gratified the Press by
long and comical debates on " What is a sardine ? "
and " What is swank ? " It is a pity that they did
not, so to speak, finish with the S's and proceed to
establish legally " What is a silhouette ? "

I have met both dealers and collectors who placed
under this elastic heading almost any side-face
portrait, whether in wax, brass, or wood. I have
equally met dealers and collectors who refused the
name silhouette to any portrait that had not a dead-
black face, ruling out Lea of Portsmouth or Foster
of Derby. They suffer, I imagine, from that little
knowledge which is so perilous, and fancy *' sil-
houette " to be the French root -word for shadow.

Now, having met the information in line one of
every article upon the subject, I had made a vow
not to chronicle, unless allusively, the ancient fact
that the name Silhouette derived itself, in mockery

181

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

of . meanness, from Etienne de Silhouette, French
Minister of Finance in 1759. The art existed long
before his time, and not till Edouart's day did the
word " shade " or *' profile " give place generally
in England to the more ugly " silhouette." It
therefore seems ridiculous to harp upon this accident
of name. The derivation is, however, interesting
because it seems to me that till the Courts decide,
it is our best criterion. Silhouette, used as a word
of scorn for everything cheap, fastened itself at last
upon an art which only needed the simplest materials
for its adequate fulfilment. Clearly, then, silhouette
is not a term that can include such portraits as are
modelled in wax or finely carved in wood. By its
very origin, the word implies some effect gained with
a rigid economy of means.

However ill -adapted, therefore, it may seem to the
fine-worked gems of Mrs. Beetham, it surely fits with
admirable exactness those delicious efforts to state
landscape in the terms of paper, to which purists
would deny the term. Groups such as Edouart's
admittedly are silhouettes ; add a tree or two and
half a dozen cows— hey, presto ! the thing has become
" cut paper. . . .'y That is the theory ; but
though the last heading is convenient enough, I see

182

IN MEMORIAM, REBH. WOODS. DIEb '1^95.
Cut in blue paper and adorned with spangles. 'j' ••'"«.'«» i

CUT PAPER"

no reason to regard cut paper as any more than just
one kind of silhouette.

It is, in fact, a very interesting kind and one
oddly neglected till of late by most collectors.
Perhaps one reason is that it lacks documents or
signatures to an unusual degree, so that, however
much a man might become a connoisseur, he could
not ever hope to be an expert. This is an undoubted
drawback, for even a collector of beer-bottle corks
finds some part of his joy in the glad consciousness
that he knows All About Them.

Fancy designs were certainly cut by the professed
silhouettists, as may be seen for instance from Gapp's
label, but it is rare indeed that one finds a signed
specimen of any early date ; never (to dogmatize
from only a fourteen-year search) one that bears
a label. Abroad, it is true, the science would be
easier, for Frederick Hendriks has recorded a visit
at Dusseldorf to Wilhelm Miiller, whose goats perched
on abrupt hills one could recognize from the examples
given ; * there is Konewka whose illustrated edition
of the Midsummer's NighVs Dream is world famous ;
Mrs. Nevill Jackson records the names of Karl
Frohlich, Packeny of Vienna, Runge who cut flowers
* The Queen, Dec. 29, 1906.
183

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

that pleased Goethe ; whilst one of the most curious
sptecimeiis in my collection — a crude and early
'* Crucifixion " surrounded by dice, scourges, ladders,
the crowing cock, and all other emblems, finely cut
in black — bears the cut inscription, " Verfertick L.
Broc." In England, however, the would-be historian
of cut-paper must wait, I think, untU the day of
Gapp or Hubard for his documents. The Hubard
prodigy makes much play with cut paj>er in his
elaborate advertisement and promises such varied
fare as " Perspective Views, Architectural, Blilitary,
Sporting Pieces, Family Groups." It must (in the
catchword of Master Hubard^s age) be left to the
ingenious reader to decide which heading covers the
spirited design cut in blue paper by him that
adorns plate xli. To me it suggests, more than any-
thing, a crazy foreboding of the Russian baUet.

The fact is that this was a polite accomplishment ;
taught — ^it would seem — ^in the seminaries for young
ladies and afterwards practised in mere love by the
Georgian damsel, who had no hockey or vote-meetings
and could not always be enjoying the delirious
excitement of having her shade taken. These
elaborate designs of an astounding fineness may be
the wo^ of amateurs no less than the delicious

184

"CUT PAPER

needlework of the same period. It was, in fact,
clearly the smart thing to do. Reference has been
made in another chapter to the cut paper album of
Lady Blessington, whilst in the Victoria and Albert
Museimi print -room may be found some classic and
domestic scenes inscribed, " Copied by Mrs. Wigston
from Lady Templetown's designs."

Sceptics, infused with the meaning of that poor
submerged word " amateur " in this bridge-plajdng
age, need only glance at pi. xxxv. Here, one would
say, is work cut by a professional. The peacocks
are of irreproachable design ; cupids and grapes
alike are utterly beyond reproach ; the whole is
beautifully cut in an effective dark blue paper.
Silver and red adorn the coats-of-arms, as also the
sexton and flight into Egypt, whilst the first colour
gleams also from the latticed church window.
Nothing could be finer, nothing more elaborate.
Yet this is no more than a tribute to Rebeccah
Woods by her heart-broken husband, for by the
church-porch, underneath a weeping willow, there
appears: «'Reb*'- Woods, Died 7 Sep'- 1795, Aged
87," and (always cut in the blue paper), these
pathetic lines :

185

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

" Farewell, Dear Wife, thy lofs to us is great
Who is left behind to mourn thy last retreat.
A tender Wife and a Parent Dear
We Daily found in you while living here.
Her God hath cald her where She is shure to have
A Blifs more Solid than herS elf once gave.''

Education has improved notoriously, since 1795,
even among the educated classes ; but there are
symptoms both in spelling and in grammar which
hint that this beautiful specimen may be the work
of a quite common man.

As to the manner of this handicraft, eye-witnesses
agree that it was very swiftly done and — ^in its
rougher forms — frequently with hands held under
table. This, of course, was merely what we now
call " swagger." Grannies and others who remember
this talk with one consent of scissors : but there is
little doubt that the fine earliest work — much of it
done in the monasteries — was accomplished with a
knife. Such incredible fineness could not be other-
wise attained, and one specimen, of a saint with skull
and cross reclining under trees, shows tiny birds
disporting in a labyrinth of greenery that seems
to leave no entry for the scissors. For those, how-

186

CUT PAPER"

ever, who value half an ounce of fact more than two
tons of logic there is proof in a later cutting of
religious nature. An oddly compounded border of
royal and religious emblems, cut in white, surrounds
the Lord's Prayer and this poem of a simple charm :

" 'Tis religion that can give
Sweetest pleasures whilst we live.
^Tis Religion must supply
Solid comfort when we die.
After death its joys will be
Lasting as eternity.
Be living God our friend.
Then our bliss shall Never end.^^

These lines conclude with a flower and " John
Momfroy, 1831," whilst the prayer ends definitely,
"Amen. Cut with a Knife." This rules out
argument. . . .

It may, in fact, be said that the instrument used
was a matter of caprice. Some curiously fine old
cut -paper designs used to illustrate " The Sculptor
Caught Napping " as recently as 1899 were produced
by a combination of the methods. Jane E. Cook
was the artist, and her descendant in a preface says :
" To produce them white paper has been cut out with

187

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

a pair of scissors, and the obvious necessity of adding
essential details to the resulting outline was supplied
by delicately marking the Vhite paper with the fine
point of a stiletto." A cameo-effect was thus
obtained, and the designs make a fine contrast with
plain black silhouettes that fill a corner of each page.
Clearly this was the method used in a form of Vic-
torian portrait-silhouette, where buttons, lace, creases,
even hair and ear-rings, are pushed out in relief upon
the black.

More doubt exists as to whether any form of
magnifying spectacles was used, such as must surely
have been employed by Miers and the others who did
silhouettes for jewelled settings. If our dear grand-
mothers really cut these minute patterns without
artificial aid, the process may explain our eyesight.
Our grandparents have cut grapes and our children's
eyes are set in spectacles. . . .

Mrs. Delany, indeed, whose name will always be
associated with cut-paper work, did not begin this
labour, which might seem to call for " young eyes,"
till she was amply seventy. She had, of course,
long ere this given delight to George III, that en-
thusiastic amateur of all things odd, by her rolled-
paper pictures, cardboard temples, and I know not

188

HERALDIC EMBLEM

Cut in white paper (xviii. century). Actual size.

CUT PAPER"

what of curious enterprise ; but the inscription in her
famous " Hortus Siccus," now in the British Museum,
begins :

*' Plants copied after Nature in paper Mosaick
begun in the year 1774 :

Hail to the happy hour ! when Fancy led
My pensive mind this flowery path to tread.*^

A pgean of joy surprising when one reads :

*' This paper mosaick work was first begun in the
seventy-fourth year of my age (which I at first only
meant as an imitation of an ' Hortus Siccus ') as an
employment and amusement, to supply the loss of
those that had formerly been delightful to me ; but
had lost their power of pleasing ; being deprived
of that Friend, whose partial approbation, was my
Pride, and had stamp't a value on them. ..."
(The reference is no doubt to her husband.)

This preface, which runs to some length, is signed
*' Mary Delany, Bulstrode, 5th July, 1779."

Three years later, or eight after the work's be-
ginning, in a more shaky hand appears this tragic
entry :

" The time is come. I can no more
The Vegetable world explore,
189

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

No more with rapture cull each flower
That paints the mead or twines the Bower. . . .
Farewell to all those friendly Powers
That blest my solitary Hours.
Ala^, farewell ! . . .
O ! sanctify the pointed Dart,
That at this Moment rends my Heart ;
Teach me submissive to resign
When summoned by thy Will Divine.
St. James Place, 1782. M. D."

The flowers themselves, of which there are ten
bulky volumes, are cut in small bits with no attempt
at a bold sweep, and mounted upon black. Often
the signature M. D. is cut out in black, and the
specimens are dated. The colour is good and a fine
effect is gained in such a specimen as that named
" Lilium Canadensis " (this may be garden latin, so
I leave it), with endless super-imposed reds, pinks,
yellows, touched by spots of paint. On the whole,
most success is gained with the small plants, for there
is no pretence at grouping in the larger pieces ; but
the realism of the work is startling, and it must
always remain a wonderful achievement for so eld a
lady.

190

"CUT PAPER

She did not at all events lack praise in her own
day. " Letters from Mrs. Delany to Mrs. Frances
Hamilton from the year 1779 to 1788," published by
Longman in 1820 with a silhouette frontispiece of
Mrs. Delany, is full of tributes from the greatest
in the land. George III looked on the old lady as no
less than a genius, and the kindness to her of him
and his Queen seems to have had no limits. So late
as 1787 Mrs. Preston writes, " The King and Queen . . .
increase in affection and respect to Mrs. D., and the
King always makes her lean on his arm. Her house
is cheerful, and filled with her own charming works.
No pictures have held their colours so well. I had
time to look over near a volume of her flowers. She
has finished nine hundred and eighty sheets, and
regrets that the thousand she intended wants twenty
of its full number." Dr. Darwin, author of the
*' Botanic Garden," wrote a poem beginning :

" So now Delany forms her mimic powers,
Her paper foliage and her silken flowers."

Whilst Mr. Gilpin, another author of those days,
records in a book on the Highlands :

" In the progress of her work she pulls the flower
in pieces — ^and having cut her papers to the shape

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

of the several parts, she puts them together, giving
them a richness and consistence, by laying one piece
over another, and often a transparent piece over
part of a shade which softens it. Very rarely she
gives any colour with a brush. . . . These flowers
have both the beauty of painting and the exactness
of botany ; and the work, I have no doubt, into
whatever hands it may hereafter fall, will be long
considered as a great curiosity."

Finally, Mr. Chalmers in his Biographical Dic-
tionary, having paid a tribute to her oil-paintings,
embroideiy, and shell -work, proceeds : " But what
is more remarkable, at the age of seventy-four she
invented a new and beautiful mode of exercising her
ingenuity." The article is long, but as of chief
interest emerge three facts : Mrs. Delany did not
draw her flowers before she cut them — she dyed
paper if none of the Chinese varieties at her disposal
fitted Nature's hue — ^and by a pleasant touch which
reveals the fine old lady (whom he calls "a noble
ruin ") in a single human moment, he tells us that
she would sometimes place a real leaf among her
simulated ones and note with joy that nobody
detected it. , . .

No greater mistake, however, could be made than
192

O n

•e »
•> «

w o

c32

"CUT PAPER"

to imagine that flowers or even landscapes exhausted
the resources of fancy-subject silhouette. Its variety
indeed would be not the least charm for a collector ;
and it may be at once asserted with dogmatic brevity
(for a whole book could easily be written on so-called
" cut-paper ") that in this department of silhouette
one can not speak of any decadence. These fancy-
cuts had always something childish in them — ^whence
their perennial attraction. They were a thing that
people did " for fim " ; and often enough that is
how the things most worth while are produced.
How proud these craftsmen were as their original
conception grew, how hard it was to lay the master-
piece aside or make the dull admission that it had
been finished ! Of course they did not ! No, they
added spangles. . . . There was never any classic
severity about cut-paper, and so it follows there can
be no decadence. True, one of the earliest specimens
in my tentative collection, undated but marked
Jacobean by its frame and spirit, shows the sim-
plicity of old lace in its fine design ; but one no later
has all the glory of straw buildings, multicoloured
peacocks, and silk-garbed courtiers.

Children with stiff arms averted from their take-
off clothes ; birds that gain colour (through slit

193 N

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

paper) from silk gummed below ; paper in varied
thicknesses, to show sunsets and varied light -effects
when held up to a candle ; handsomely clothed
figures before cut and painted backgrounds ; ela-
borate Dutch landscapes, whole avenues of wobbly
cut-out trees, encased in deep, worm-eaten boxes;
a pair of urns with gorgeous bouquets of lavishly
protruding blossoms, one inscribed " Julia," the other
" Kate " ; cut-paper fans ; a candle-screen, cut
flowers between talc ; Napoleon profile in black with
every fold of his coat shown, the high lights got by
the white paper background; the same front -face,
an awful and quite un-Imperial sight ; a troop of
cavalry, showing their black shadows cast before
them by an equally black sun ; monkish productions,
the work of hands left idle by the printing-press and
its swift victory over manuscript — productions often
not far from that kindred hobby, pin-prick pictures ;
early sporting scenes, cut in white paper or (a later
luxury) in gold, with dogs that pounce at abrupt
angles upon hinds or hares quite undismayed;
delicious imitations of worked samplers, with crazy
houses in the backgroimd and before them a post-
impressionist menagerie of animals in sizes never
planned by nature, vast swans swimming past wee

194.

"CUT PAPER"

stepping horses or timid ladies overshadowed by
well-nourished swine : without discussing such old
circles as are found in watches or square end-papers
seen in ancient tomes, what end should there be to
enumerating the varieties of subject-silhouette ?

One or two only must have fuller mention, and for
varied reasons.

There are people who, under a pretence of system,
revel in dividing everything under so many headings
that the result is a glorious confusion. These have
invented the weird term *' Lace-paper." The work
which it is meant to cover is nothing more than
paper so finely cut that it resembles lace. The effect
is naturally more striking in such a specimen as I
have mentioned, the early design copied almost
certainly from a lace model : but no less delightful
when the imitation or pretence is cast totally aside.
One, something of a compromise, shows a border
clearly modelled upon lace, in its appropriate white,
though in the centre is a delicately painted oval
emblem — ^tambourine, flute, music, roses, doves — an
utterly harmonious decoration set against black silk
and shrined in its deep oval frame made by a carver
at "No. 2, the East End of Middle Row, Holborn
Bars." Other specimens of the same period, late

195

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

eighteenth century, abandon more entirely the
pretence of lace, for though of even more astounding
fineness, their inspiration is from heraldry. The late
Lady Dorothy Nevill, one of the first connoisseurs
in this cut-paper, had a fine specimen of this work,
mounted on a mirror. One in my collection shows
the Beauchamp-Procter arms : namely (so a herald
tells me), " Quarterly I. and IV. ; Argent, a
Chevron between three martlets sable — Procter 11.
and III. ; Gules, a fess, between six billets (three
and three bar ways), or ; a canton ermine — Beau-
champ. Crest: On a mount vert, a grey hound
sejant argent, spotted brown, collared or. Motto :
Toujours fidde." I can at least guarantee the
motto, and hope the rest is copied out correctly. . . .
The whole, which I should have called a wolf and
greyhound each side of a coat-of-arms enclosed in a
garter bearing the words "Tria Juncta In Uno," is
in white paper, marvellously cut down to the tiniest
rose, crown, or thistle. It is pressed between two
bits of glass and then enclosed in a fine carved black
and gilt frame, which carries Christie's mark. A
circular specimen, even more minute, shows two
cupids holding up a hatchment with three lions on it,
(this is not the herald's wording). They perch upon

196

"CUT PAPER"

a cloud and all around them are flowers or emblems
of an incredible minuteness. The motto in this case
is *' La Vertu et la Sagesse Conduisent au Bonheur."
This is cut in white and laid on blue, except that the
hatchment bears a fittingly black background. Over
it one of the cupids holds a wreath enclosing the
initials " J. C. E." Inspection of this specimen,
which only measures exactly four inches across
leaves one incredulous — ^till one reflects that even
nowadays machines are left lagging far behind, when
it comes to the finer arts. Photography, in fact, jibs
oddly at these tiny cuttings and this one can only be
shown with much of its fine detail lost (pi. xxxvi).

One need not wonder that Reproduction jibs at
another of my pet specimens, for this is eighteen
inches by a foot and even the original is packed with
detail. The scheme is indeed ambitious. The thing
might be said to hold almost All Life in its futuristic
borders — ^at any rate, the whole life of a household.
The hour is five to eight, so much one sees from the
kitchen clock, and one may safely add a.m. Madam,
on the top floor is a-bed, but yet so much awake that
baby has been brought to her. Her boots are ready,
too, beneath the dressing-table ; the kettle boils,
and pussy seems to point at something edible.

197

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

Breakfast in bed, perhaps ? Those labelled bottles
on the mantelpiece half hint at sickness, till with a
real relief we see that Madam's hat and parasol are
hung up ready for the afternoon. Besides, no
invalid could bear those statues in her room. . . .
Down in the drawing-room, where flowers luxuriate
and the best china lives, it is a scene of opulence.
The pictures are by Masters clearly ; silhouettes
flank the mirror (of a silver tinsel) ; a red tinsel fire
blazes extravagantly behind a fender of pure gold.
The carpet, as upstairs, has a green ground ; a colour
shared by one of the two birds. The husband — or
son ? — ^is alert already. Quill in hand he balances
himself grimly on one of the crazy-angled chairs and
reaps the morning hour. Man must work, though
woman may sleep ! Gran'pa — surely it can't be the
husband — is less philosophic. He has reached the
age when Man may keep his hat on, and he is
querulous. Even nicotine does not console him.
" Dang these chairs," you can hear him complain. . .
The lowest floor is more compendious, for here we
get the garden too. Alas, dark doings are afoot
so early. Well may the parrot or peacock look stiffly
surprised, well may Fido bark and snarl beneath the
drying clothes, for I regret to say the daughter of

198

"CUT PAPER"

the house (note her smart crinoline), is meeting with
a common soldier, oddly 1790. Meanwhile, in the
kitchen, birds break in and steal the pudding, whilst
yet another dog (or it may be a rat) barks up at them
from underneath the table. Next comes the servant's
bedroom where of course — for this is 1830, by the
daughter's dress — ^the best furniture is kept ; the
scullery with yet another swain attendant ; and last
of all, beneath a gamp suspended in mid-air, there
mounts the parlour-maid with tea (we now perceive
it all) for Madam. The first five steps alone are seen
— ^but the last four emerge in Madam's room. . . .
Who after this shall say the past too did not have its
futurists ?

This perfect microcosm, cut in black, is headed by
an allegoric group, beautifully wrought but of a
meaning far beyond me. I seem dimly to discern
a cupid and a Juno, but she may be Venus. . . .
A rather naturally dubious-looking angel ends the
riotous procession.

Here is the whole preposterous, delightful, art of
subject-silhouette at its high-water mark, and those
who do not like it must collect Staffordshire or
postage stamps. They have not the cut-paper
mind. . . .

199

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

Of course there are simpler designs for those who
have the classic bent. The beautiful white houses
joined by bridges (pi. xxxvii) are beyond reproach as
a design, and not a spangle anywhere upon them :
although the work of childish hands. " Cut with
scissors by Miss Mary Holland, Born on the Pedlar's
Acre March 7, 1770, before she was ten years old,"
runs the inscription, proudly attested by "Mrs.
Mary Ann Davis, Senior." From another specimen,
largely similar but with a less successful border, we
learn that Mrs. Davis was Mary's mother-in-law at a
later date. Then there is, not signed unluckily or
dated save by its poke-bonnets, a delicious pier
with cut-paper waves and an idle crowd of sight-
seers ; or white birds on black backgrounds, with
wings cut in relief — a refinement found so early as
1757. Sometimes, even, the art of painting was put
under contribution for a subject, and opposite may
be found an adaptation of Morland's famous picnic.
Paper and style alike proclaim this an eighteenth
century piece, and it is of interest to note that the
silhouettist, so early, has not boggled at one full -face
figure. It cannot be claimed that this is an improve-
ment on the old convention : but in a signed portrait
of an officer by Torond a pleasant effect is gained by

200

THE ANGLERS* REPAST, after Morland.
Cut in. black paper (xviii century). Size of original 19-in. x 16.

CUT PAPER

the black profile placed over a body painted (as it
were !) full face in grey, brown, and black.

And lastly, lest to close upon these plain specimens
should kindle heresies on decadence, a specimen no
later shows a full -face Ceres walking through the
corn whilst cupids riot round her and a dragon
looking very out of place lies by her side. Lutes,
drums, scrolls of music, mix with birds and squirrels
in the splendidly cut border and no colour almost
in the rainbow is found wanting.

In short, for once embarked upon cut-paper, I
grow tedious, here ready for collectors is a field whose
great charm is the unexpected. You never may
become an expert . . . but you can never grow
accustomed. Each specimen shows something new.

Lately, in the provinces, a dealer in reply to my
inquiries said : " Now what a pity, sir, you didn't
call in a few days ago. I had a table covered with
that queer old stuff. Oh, it was finely cut. I never
saw such work ; but no one seemed to fancy it, and
so I scraped it off. A fine old Chippendale piece it
was too. I wish I'd known you cared for that old
paper-work. . . ."

We all have our tragedies. And I console myself
with the reflection that it may have happened twenty

201

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

years ago, or even not at all. Certainly no seasoned
connoisseur will vex his soul about the old old tale :
" I've just sold such a beauty." These are the lures
of a dealer who wishes one to call again ; arts no less
obvious than those of the dear, simple collector who
believes in the policy ^of " stalking-horses." Averting
his eye doggedly from the object he is panting to
possess, he asks in hang-dog tones, " Have you got
any miniatures of Nelson ? " or something similar.
The dealer scarcely worries to reply. To him this is
a query in the class of " How d'you do ? " To
answer in full betrays social inexperience. " No,
sir," he says tolerantly ; "do you collect anything
else ? " " Well," answers the wily one, striving
to combine a calm voice with his bumpy heart,
*' what's that old black portrait on chalk — is it ?
— ^in the window ? " . . . The dealer turns his back
to get it, and his smile is hidden. Another silhouette
collector !

Ye gods, what fools we mortals be ! But it is of
such harmless comedies that is compounded the
pleasant friendship between dealer and collector ; a
genial freemasonry that possibly no other trade can
show.

202

PRACTICAL

CHAPTER X

PRACTICAL

This is a sordid chapter. People with beautiful
white souls had better pass on to the next.

Most of us, however, deep down in our hidden selves,
have a black spot which hankers to worst some one
in a deal, or — at the very nicest — never to be worsted
by another. Even those who begin to spell art with
a big A usually let £ s. d. creep into it before the
end.

I had intended maxims for collectors, and in my
earlier note-books I find a few jotted down.

" Buy at the cheapest and sell at the dearest shop.
Whafs broken can't be mended, however well restored.
Look at the silhouette, mistrust the signature behind.
Never think anyone ignorant except yourself."

What excellent good sense, and how entirely useless I
Splendid faith of Youth, which had planned counsel
no less wasted than the mumbled saws of grandpapa,
that fall upon the deaf ears of Inexperience, longing

205

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

indeed to be wise but thinking error the pathway
of more promise. What is the use of knowledge
learnt by others ? Find it yourself, it is a pearl
beyond all price ; let anyone else offer it, the thing
is boring rubbish. . . .

And yet there may be some few anxious to know
what to buy, where to find it, and what to avoid.

As to the last, a fascinating subject, the dangers are
not yet so great as they will be in the near future.
Even forgers stand in need of education and so far
I have seen few of them advanced beyond the idea
of silhouette as a cut-paper portrait. London of
late has been deluged with a series of six heads.
Every framemaker and most antique-dealers have
been victimized by these rough cuttings, all bearing
pencilled names of such high sound as Cromwell and
Napoleon. Some one has been busy with his scissors I
Diverging here, I may embark on yet another maxim.
Always be suspicious of silhouettes piu-porting to
be Nelson or men of an equal name. They may of
course be ancient, they almost certainly will not be
Nelson, who was much busier than George III. The
placing of great names on imidentified old silhouettes
is quite a hobby with some dealers, and, I may add,
with some collectors also. Turning to those that

206

PRACTICAL

are not old there is one series of fakes not cut out of
paper but done upon flat glass. Some of these are
ladies — ^Antoinette, one may be sure — but most of
them are Generals or Admirals of old-world repute.
The names of these are written on the glass (a thing
I can recall in no authentic specimen), usually with
one letter above another, like the signature of a
Japanese print or forged wax medallion. Anyone
with half an ounce of observation can detect these
from the fact that the glass is too big and the ink
of a dirty unconvincing brown. Equally unsatisfying
to anyone not fatally myopic is the attempt to gild
the cut-out shadow. Where the difference lies it is
not easy to describe in words, but colour and above
all touch are wrong. The most frequent gilt specimen
that I have seen is of a youth, rather large in size,
inscribed with the fine name " Sir Rainald Knightley."
This may be found in plain black also or on a curious
pink glass. Dear Sir Rainald, he is an old friend.
I have met him in a score of shops and half as many
guises. He must be, in popularity, a close rival to
George Washington.

Quite an interesting collection might be made of
fakes, and indeed Mrs. Nevill Jackson told me once
that she intended it. Another could be formed,

207

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

cheerily amusing, of the poor unknown folk who
have been posthumously christened Wellington,
Queen Charlotte, Washington, or Marie Antoinette.
I have a really fine old silhouette of a young man in the
eighteen-twentys inscribed Napoleon, and once pos-
sessed a duly autographed Dickens, superb in college
cap : — what irony to those who know his younger days !
Frames are no guide, even when you have learnt
to know at sight those brought into being through
wholesale massacre of papier mache trays and
fitted with thin acorns of new brass. They are a
snare, indeed, for many an old frame has held a
silhouette cut from the Connoisseur and backed by
a reprint of the 1810 Observer or sections from old
calf book-bindings, whilst that delicious lady in
the top-hat from Mrs. Nevill Jackson's book must
be quite used, by now, to an old thin brass oval ! She
certainly is charming as a decoration, but I have met
her in some good collections. These are the moments
when tact fights with truth. I have also, in my wander-
ings, met many a gilt silhouette ascribed to Edouart,
clearly by people who have never read that stern
profilist's warm comments on this " unnatural "
addition to the shadow proper. Edouart, by the
way, although commonly called Auguste, signed

208

PRACTICAL

" Aug°- Edouart," short for Augustin, a curious fact
ignored by one forger whose clever work has come
my way.

Well, they will learn, as they have learnt in needle-
work and china. Soon we shall have them working
upon chalk like Miers, rivalling the daintiness of Mrs.
Beetham, and then the real fun will begin, for what
else is Collecting than a contest of wits, a trial of
strength, one more form of all-inclusive sport ? Soon,
too, no doubt we shall have beautiful cut -papers and
they will be ashamed of the one specimen that I
have so far seen, though I have seen it often : Victoria,
crudely cut, with wobbly generals reviewing the
troops at her coronation.

What to buy, then, these ignored ?

First of all, of course — if you can — specimens on
chalk or glass, complete in pear-wood or brass oval,
with label still unbroken, and the beautiful old
convex glass adorned with patterns in the gold and
white. Here is the cream of silhouette and I will
allow counterfeiters a good century before they
reach to it. But even when fate does not smile to
this extent, one often finds labelled specimens, and
these should be preferred for reasons clear from the
pages before this. Eighteenth- century portraits,

209 O

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

too, are an obvious objective, and plain black profiles,
or black and grey — contrary to vulgar prejudice —
are better than the gilt, unless these last are labelled
Miers.

After a little, naturally, collectors will learn the
styles of profilists so surely that the author of a
profile can be named at sight. For this, like all else,
there is no master but experience. All of the great
exponents had tricks of their own, as I have tried
to show in chapter iii, and by these their work may
be recognized without the possibility of error. Lately,
in visiting Mr. Wellesley's collection, I was able to
identify two specimens in mine, entirely individual
but unluckily not signed. In one case, it was a fine
portrait of an officer, painted on glass to throw the
shadow on to chalk behind ; the body as dark as
in work by Charles, the face ciu'iously transparent.
In Mr. Wellesley's collection I found one done in
exactly the same formula and signed by Lea of
Portsmouth, who no doubt mostly painted martial
sitters. The other specimen was yet more individual,
not so much from its style of paint as from the
method of its setting. Here (for it was in fact a
pair) portraits delicately painted on fiat glass were
surrounded by an oval of holes pierced in the black,

AN OFFICER
By H. p. Roberts, painted on flat glass.

PRACTICAL

thus displaying circles of a gold-leaf laid behind.
This novel method of obtaining a gold-and-black
border was, I now learn, the speciality of H. P.
Roberts. As this artist signed but little, yet did
work easy to recognize at sight, I reproduce the
specimen, pi. xxxix. At Knole there is a pair by
H. P. Roberts upon which I could find no name,
and other connoisseurs or owners may be helped to
a sure attribution

Upon the point of what to buy it would be idle
to say more. The best, naturally : and the gift to
recognize it is a gift from heaven. There is in
good things, as old Plato knew, an intrinsic quality,
unmistakable and indescribable, so that a man who
has once learnt the meaning of the Good will know
instinctively good china, good prints, good silhouettes,
good anything at all. The tragedy of this world
is that most people have a flair only for the bad. . . .

Some portraits simply cut-out are of value, others
would be dear at threepence ; with which obvious
but deep remark, and the advice that broken specimens
are never cheap, I must pass on to my next heading,
« Where To Buy."

London, certainly. Ask any dealer, he will say
the same. So far as antiques go, it is indeed " the

211

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

market of the world." The Paris quays ? Paris is
buying old stuff {and new) daily from the London
dealers. In Germany, as France, the silhouette
has won its way back earlier than here, and every-
thing is snapped up for that market from the London
shops.

London is the place, but use a little common sense.
Think of the rents, and buy where the big dealers
buy. Not in draughty cattle markets, exploited
by reporters and stocked largely by the West-end
brokers, but in the little back-streets and the outer
suburbs. Yet equally, since any dogma holds about
as much truth as its opposite, often a big dealer will
scornfully ask nothing for small things bought in a
lot with something that he wanted.

Least satisfactory of all must be accounted private
bargains. The man who knows nothing about
values does not favour anyone except himself. He
has " been told that it is very valuable." It certainly
is " very old." He would not sell if he did not
want money instantly. He thinks it should be
worth a five-pound note to you. And a remittance
will oblige. . . .

Lately, a Yorkshire worthy wrote to me, saying
he had two silhouettes " on paper, framed in ebony,"

212

PRACTICAL

and — alternate formula — desired an offer. A friend
had " made an offer for them and said they were
valuable." Admiring the superior honesty of a friend
who apparently in one breath could make these two
remarks, I answered that I could perhaps do more
if I might either see the silhouettes or else know
what his friend had offered. This last altogether
without guile : — I wished to see what was expected
of me. Perhaps I never quite realized what havoc
ten years of London had played with my moral sense
till I received his answer. I was to understand that
it would not be fair to his friend to give his bid
away ; " folks in Yorks," did not transact business
in that way. The silhouettes were marvellously
" well preserved," and had " always been displayed
in his drawing-room " ; and when he was next in
London he would " call into Christie's with them
and have them valued properly." . . .

Dear me, what a lot of life's fun is missed by those
poor people who are not collectors !

218

NOW—
AND WHAT THEN?

CHAPTER XI
NOW— AND WHAT THEN ?

It is an amusing modern affectation to look down
on all the old accomplishments, as one who should
say : " Poor dears, and so they really did these
things ? How bored they must have been. Imagine
never having to extend your mind as you must do
at Bridge !"....

Thus a lover of the eighteenth-century profiles,
hearing much chatter as to Silhouette's revival,
naturally looks for big things indeed. He looks for
these condescending moderns to improve upon the
old accomplishment they have revived. . . .
He may look.

Let me not be thought to say a word against the
many profilists who have sprung up, by the old law
of demand, like mystic mushrooms upon every side.
Monsieur Bly, of the West Pier at Brighton, is
probably the best known among those who have
been established long before the new revival. He
cuts free hand, with fine contempt for the preliminary

217

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

sketch, but owns an open mind, for whilst a warm
defender of the Edouart convention, he is an experi-
mentalist, as all self-respecting silhouettists should
be. His fancy cuts have long shared the reputation
of his portraits, and he is now embarking on a
variant of the old black-and-gold glass etching.

Handrup, established at the Crystal Palace, who
cuts out fine portraits in two minutes, equally shows
a pretty taste for fancy-subjects ; a department,
however, in which the name of Captain Tharpe must
stand supreme among the living silhouettists. Baron
Scotford has lately come to Regent Street, — via
Paris, Rome, Brussels, and Glasgow, — from America,
nor need those who know anything of Silhouette
marvel that a land reputed modern should give
out such old-world products, for was she not the
home of Peale and Patience Wright ? did she not
welcome to her bosom Edouart and Master Hubard ?

Scotford in any case is an accomplished and a rapid
cutter. Setting his patron against a light back-
ground, but with no intervening screen, he draws
a rough outline in pencil (a habit deprecated, be it
said, by Handrup no less than by Bly), and doubling
a piece of thin black paper snips it with astounding
sureness as he turns it hither, and thither in a

218

.|V[iiK'e«'<

'V.L. «

^/.AiS

MICKIEWICZ. POLISH POET
Painted on card by Phil May. 1888.

NOW — AND WHAT THEN?

bewildering way. It may be here remarked that
Bly, whilst commonly working in a like manner,
sometimes uses an adaptation of the "camera lucida,"
a pleasant contrivance by which one finds the sitter's
head placed at a convenient size upon the paper laid
before one. This is of interest as showing a recur-
rence to the old advertised " machine."

The whole of this modern paper-cutting is in fact
full of an interest, however melancholy, to lovers of
the old. Scotford is of Edouart's school, but whilst
he has a happy gift for faces, especially of children,
he lacks his predecessor's odd sense of the character
in clothes. A portrait, for instance, of George
Grossmith Junior, individual and able, carries the
line from chest to knee in a pure curve, artistically
good perhaps — ^for Scotford wielded the brush in
Paris ateliers before he grasped the scissors — but surely
not sartorially true. Edouart could show a man's
soul in his buttons !

In any case, I repeat, there is no word to be said
against these cut-portraits, but they do not seem
quite enough to justify the big word, " revival."
In the best days of Silhouette, this book has shown,
the finest artists never touched a pair of scissor*.
As to this, Scotford confessed to me that he had

219

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

never seen a Miers, Rosenberg or Beetham, whilst
Handrup in an interesting booklet makes the rather
astonishing assertion : "In days gone by ... a
few painted exquisitely on ivory and plaster with
or without gold ; some on glass, china, silk or paper ;
others used mechanical devices, but it was considered
the proper and most artistic way to cut with scissors
direct from black paper . . . without any drawing or
outlining beforehand. This of course was very
difficult, but on the other hand they were able to obtain
better results, because if a line be drawn ever so fine
sharp scissors will cut it finer, even a hair's thickness
too much or too little altering the whole expression
— it is here the art of the executor lies.'*

" It was considered. ..." Here indeed is Edouart
redivivus ! In fact, this whole " revival " is oddly
like Edouart's "renaissance." In neither case is
anything at all heard of those great eighteenth-
century artists who made Silhouette an art to be
compared in its fineness and decorative charm with
that of miniature.

But even if it were, even if our reigning beauties
could still pay down their guineas to have their
noses immortalized on plaster, are there not already
enough arts content to rest weakly on bad copies

220

NOW — AND WHAT THEN?

of great achievements in the years gone by ? Will
no man of creative, of inventive force, a second
Foster, throw in his lot with this poor dainty art,
crushed out of sight for half a century by the banausic
camera and just beginning to crawl back ? Phil
May has shown a little how modern formulae could
be adapted to this old-world art, and years ago in
Edgware Road I had the good luck to find three
delicious painted specimens, of which one may be
seen upon pi. xl. Signed " Phil May, '88, Paris, Chat
Noir," it is a portrait of Mickiewicz, the Polish Poet.
Paganini — so Edouart tells us with pride — ^was wont
to declare that Edouart 's portrait was the only one
which did not burlesque him. I am ready to wager
about Mickiewicz, " though I have never seen him "
(to use the ingenuous Lavater's favourite formula),
that no artist using any other method could convey
to the spectator a more vivid, a more genially illu-
minating impression of the man in his habit as he
lived than poor Phil May has given in this brilliant
profile. The other two, representing the artist
himself with his perpetual cigar and Kennedy of
the old Aquarium instinct with the showman's suave
assurance, are portraits just as firmly satisfying ;
rousing sad regrets but also encoiu-aging the hope

221

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

that some fine artist may yet turn his gifts to portrait
silhouette in some sense broader than the snipped -
out paper.

Meanwhile, Silhouette is King — af ter his fashion. . . .

Every one suddenly is a collector of the antique
shadows. Dealers who, asked for them five years
ago, sniffed " We don't worry about them," are now
canvassing the lucky buyers. Museums, imprudently
void of silhouettes till now, are hastily buying
before the market rises further, and already Walter
Scott, Liston (two portraits, one the duplicate of that
upon pi. xix), and other of the new-found Edouarts
are in the National Portrait Gallery, whilst many
more have gone to Edinburgh and Dublin. Photo-
graphers, quick to embrace the rival they had thought
long dead, are imitating the cut-paper by taking
portraits close against a light -backed screen. The
daily Press begins to call woman's latest modish
shape her silhouette. Black tardily becomes a
fashionable colour ; cushions, curtains, posters, every-
where is the reaction to Simplicity. Sumurun's
shadow-frieze set the stage-managers wide-eyed and
minarets are everywhere against the sky. The
music halls are never far behind. " The Shadow Man
and Lady Silhouette : Artistic, Amusing, and Always

222

Cut (1) by Master Hubard and (2) by Edouart (1826.)

NOW — AND WHAT THEN?

Successful," " Silveno's Gallantygraph from U.S.A.,
embracing hand shadows, silhouettes, and mechanical
figures, ships, &c." — ^these from a recent Organ of
Variety ! Artists without the e are quickly falling
to the subject-silhouette, however shy as yet of
portraiture Maxwell Ayrton has produced some
utterly delightful coaching-scenes, — drawn of course,
not cut, — and by his kindness I am able to use one as
this book's end-papers. This is a thoroughly success-
ful adaptation of the cut-paper formula to Painting,
and Arthur Rackham also has used it, with a sure
art no less than Konewka's, in his recent decorations
for "^sop's Fables." The humorists of course
have long since seen its inimitable worth. Leslie
Willson, in the cycling days, did a whole book-full
called, " The Scorcher's Progress," wherein a red-
profile cyclist pursues his path through dead-black
traffic of assorted kinds, routing even the Life Guards
before a light yellow St. James's Palace, until at last
he meets with a steam-roller. This is a thoroughly
clever English specimen of modern silhouette, well
able to hold its own with the attempts of Caran
d'Ache. More recently, our comic artists have used
the method freely ; men of standing like Charles
Pears, or that most luxuriant of grotesque draughts-

228

THE ART OF SILHOUETTE

men, H. M. Bateman, who has perpetrated some
delirious shadows.

Perhaps, in fact, the use of Silhouette in humour
may largely claim to be a modern product, although
invented long before the so-called great revival,
which cannot snatch this credit as its own.

Well, it is young, and meanwhile, turning away from
the half-crown cut-out, however excellent; looking
up for hope and consolation to the dainty old-
world portraits gleaming on our walls ; those of us
who love poor Silhouette and know what he has
been, rejoice to see him raised by the fickle crowd
on to his throne again, even if he be but a shade of his
own shadowy self.

riNis

INDEX

Amelia, Princess, 125

British Museum, 91

Chalmers, 192
Christie, 196
Collectors :

Brown, Rev. Forster, 85

Cairnes, Mrs., 59

Dorotti, Madame, 84

Fleming, Mrs., 66

Guest, Montague, 72, 168

Jackson, Mrs. Nevill, 11, 13, 14, 32, 57, 66,
103, 117, 118, 145, 207, 208

Lane, John, 72

Nevill, Lady Dorothy, 125, 175, 196

Sackville, Lady, 14, 56, 159-162

Snow, Major-General D'Oyly, 116

Stanton, Captain, 60

Talbot, Hon. Miss Frances, 126

Taylor, Mrs. Bromley, 163, 164

Tweedie, Mrs. Alec, 113

Weguelin, Mrs., 72

Wellesley, Mr. Francis, 14, 31, 52, 66, 67, 71,
72, 74, 110, 113, 114, 125, 148, 165-169, 210

Wyatt, Mrs., 110, 118, 114
Connor, Mr., 107

Darwin, Dr., 191

Davis, Mrs. Mary Ann, senr., 200

Downman, 167

225 P

INDEX

Gilpin, Mr., 191
Hamilton, Mrs. Frances, 191
Knole, 36, 56, 159, 167, 211

Lace-Papee, 195

Lavater, J. G., 33-35, 41-44, 97, 125, 172, 173, 221

Lucas, 163

Lukis, Frederica, 104, 116, 117

McRae, John, 150
Mills, Weymer, 54, 169

National Portrait Gallery, 31, 222

RuSKiN, John, 34

Silhouette, Etienne de, 12, 182

SiLHOUETTISTS :

Adolphe, 114, 122

Atkinson, G., 31

Ayrton, Maxwell, 223

Bateman, H. M., 224

Beaumont, 83, 92, 116, 126, 170

Beetham, Mrs., 13, 30, 37, 38, 45, 47-50, 54, 61,

62, 65, 66, 72, 86, 89, 109, 124, 137-141, 160,

166, 168, 170, 182, 209, 220
Belluti, 174

Blessington, Countess of, 127, 185
Bly, Monsieur, 217-219
Broc, Verfertick L., 184
Bull, Mrs., 51
Charles, 13, 22, 49-51, 54, 62, 85, 89, 146, 170,

210
Coog, 161
Cook, Jane E., 187
d'Ache, Caran, 223
Dashwood, Lady, 125
226

INDEX

SiLHouETTiSTS — continued

Delaney, Mrs., as subject, 31 ; as cut-paper

artist, 188-192
Dempsey, 154
Driscoll, 116
Edouart, Augustin Amant Constance Fidele, 12,

13, 29, 32, 37, 46, 54, 63, 80, 83, 97-112,

116-118, 147-151, 160, 170, 172, 173, 182,

208, 209, 218-221
Field, 63, 75, 76, 145, 146, 168, 170
Foster, of Derby, 56-61, 64, 81, 82, 92, 121, 161,

164, 170, 181, 221
Frith, F., 75, 77, 78, 92, 170
Frohlich, Karl, 183
Gapp, J., 46, 80, 154, 183, 184
Gonord, 113
Haines, 136, 154
Hamlet, 66, 170
Handrup, 218, 220
Harrington, Mrs., 71
Herve, 63, 75-77, 170
Holland, Miss Mary, 200
Hubard, Master, 31, 32, 78, 79, 136, 151-153,

170, 184, 218
Hunt, Mrs. Leigh, 31, 32, 124
Jorden, 52, 66, 170
Joubert, 161
Kelfe, Lane, 124
Kennedy, 221
Konewka, 172, 183, 223
Lea, of Portsmouth, 181, 210
Lightfoot, Mrs., 143
Lovell, Thomas, 145
MacKenzie, Laura, 126
May, Phil, 221
Miers, John, 13, 30, 32, 45, 61-66, 72, 76, 82,

92, 109, 118, 136, 142-147, 160, 164, 166, 168,

170, 171, 188, 209, 220
227

INDEX

SiLHouETTisTS — continued
Mitchell, J. S., 60, 61
Momfroy, John, 187
Miiller, Wilhelm, 160, 183
Packeny, 183
Peale, 218
Pears, Charles, 223
Phelps, 74
Philip, John, 124
Prosopographus, 88, 89
Pye, John, 163
Rackham, Arthur, 223
Roberts, H. P., 211
Rosenberg, Charles, 30, 37, 43, 45, 48, 51-54,

89, 107, 136, 141, 142, 151, 160, 167, 168, 170,

172, 220
Rosier, James, junr., 80
Rought, 73, 147
Rudolph, 175
Runge, 183
Schatzmann, 125
Scotford, Baron, 218, 219
Seville, F. W., 91
Skeolan, 154

Spornberg, W., 54-57, 82, 161, 168, 170
Templeton, Lady, 185
Tharp, Captain, 218
Thomason, I., 147, 170
Torond, 71, 107, 113, 147, 200
Tussaud, J. P., 88
Wellings, 161
Wigston, Mrs., 185
Willson, Leslie, 223
Woodham, J., 86
Woods, 185

Wright, Mrs. Patience, 113, 218
Young, W. M., 84
Smith, Albert, 172

228

INDEX

Stadler, 172

Subject-silhouettes, 183-201
Subjects :

Alexandra, Queen, 160

Ansley family, 56

Awdry, the Misses, 83

Bedford, Duchess of, 160

Brougham, Lord, 171

Browning, Robert, 32

Buckland, Dr., 102

Burney family, 110

Burney, Fanny, 32

Burns, Mrs., 143

Burns, Robert, 32, 171

Byron, Lord, 32

Charles X, 32, 101

Charlotte, Queen, 31, 168

Dalrymple, Sir Hew, 72

Darling, daughters of Sir Ralph, 117

Derby, Countess of, 160

D'Oyly, Sir Thomas, 116

Egerton, Mrs., 176

Elizabeth, Princess, 31 ; as amateur artist,
124, 125, 176

Erskine, 176

Fauconberg, Lord, 161

Frederick of Prussia, 173

Fisher, Kitty, 176

Fitzherbert, Mrs., 31

Fox, Charles James, 31

George III, 31, 60, 72, 162, 163, 167, 171-173,
188, 191

George IV, 31, 52, 176

Gibbon, Edward, 31, 171

Goethe, 31, 167 ; as amateur profilist, 113

Goldsmith, Oliver, 31

Grey, Earl, 171

Grossmith, George, junr., 219
229

INDEX

S UB JECTS — continued

Gutch, Rev. John, 103
Harrison, General, 73
Howe, Lord (reputed), 63
Johnstone, Mrs., 176
Jones, Miss Di, 47, 49
Josephine, Empress, 164
Kean, Edmund, 176
Keate, Dr., 171
Keats, John, 32
Keith, Sir Robert, 72
Knightley, Sir Rainald, 207
Lee, James, 152
Liston, John, 108, 222
Magendie, Bishop of Bangor, 98
Massy, Hon. C, 146
Mathews, Mrs., 47, 49
Mickiewicz, 221
Napoleon, 31, 164
Nelson, Lord, 31, 85
O'Connell, Daniel, 171
Paganini, 32, 221
Parry family, 126
Pembroke, Earl of, 72
Pitt, William, 31, 92, 174
Pius VI, Pope, 57-59
Pompadour, Mme. de, 32
Robinson, Perdita, 31
Russell, Lord John, 171
Sackville, Lord, 160
Scott, Sir Walter, 32, 66, 222
Siddons, Mrs., 176
Simeon, Dr., 109, 151
Smart, 168
Stephens, Miss, 176
Symons, Benjamin Parsons, 103
Thomson, David, 129-132
Thun (? Thier), Mdlle., 72, 73
230

INDEX

Subjects — continued

Tyler, President John, 103

Victoria, Queen, 31

Wellington, Duke of, 32, 77, 85

William IV, 31

White, Blanco, 103
Swift, Jonathan, 46

TOMKINS, 125

Townshend, Barbara Anne, 172
Tuer, Andrew, 33

Victoria and Albert Museum, 33, 166, 170, 176, 185

Printed by

Ballantyne & Company Ltd

London

.*t':t5»

HOME USE

CIRCULATION DEPARTMENT

MAIN LIBRARY

This book is due on the last date staniped below
1 month loans may be renewed by calling 642-3405.
Tmonth loans may be recharged by bringing books

to Circulation Desk.
Renewals and recharges may be made 4 days prior

to due date.

ALL BOOKS ARE SUBJECT TO RECALL 7 DAYS

AFTER DATE CHECKED OUT.

JAN 2 9 1977

SBG^Gft

Mzrif

r»iiU!L.ivf

:tf-^CULAT;nN OEPT

LD21 — A-40m-8,'75
(S7737L)

General Library ,
University of California
Berkeley

p^yG 1 V) 1954 Lir~|

Liiii

751719

UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA UBRARY

U C.BERKELEY LIBRARIES

lllllll III! lliMiiii nil Hill nil nil mil mil III III

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "The art of the silhouette"

See other formats