silhouette

silhouette. An outline image in one, solid, flat colour usually against a plain background, giving the appearance of a shadow cast by a solid figure. The principle goes back at least as far as Greek black-figure vases, but the term is applied particularly to profile portraits in black against white (or vice versa), either painted or cut from paper, which were extremely popular in the period c.1750–c.1850. Silhouettes represented the quickest and cheapest method of portraiture (they have been called ‘the poor man's miniature’), and their characteristic purity and simplicity were particularly appealing in the age of Neoclassicism. They harked back to the legend (recorded by Pliny) that portraiture was invented when the daughter of a potter from Corinth ‘drew in outline on the wall the shadow of her lover's face thrown by a lamp’; pictures representing this story and entitled either ‘The Origin of Painting’ or ‘The Corinthian Maid’ were popular in the 18th century (an example by David Allan, 1775, is in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh). Additional intellectual prestige came from J. C. Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (1775–8, English translation 1789–98), which were illustrated by silhouettes. Lavater's work was held in great respect throughout Europe, notably by Goethe, who was himself an amateur devotee of silhouette making. The usual format was a head profile, but conversation pieces were also fairly common, and some exponents even produced genre scenes, history pictures, and landscapes. After about 1800 the essential purity of the silhouette was vitiated by the introduction of colour, gilding, fancy backgrounds, and other embellishments. Its death-blow, like that of the miniature, was dealt by the popularization of photography, although interesting experiments have later been made, such as the animated silhouette films of the German film-maker Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981).

During the century or so when silhouettes were at the height of their popularity there were hundreds of professional exponents of the art in Britain alone (some set up in fashionable places, while others toured the country), as well as countless amateurs. Many artists worked freehand, but some used mechanical aids, notably the ‘silhouette chair’ designed by Lavater. This entailed the sitter posing in front of a translucent screen, onto which a profile shadow was cast by a candle or other light. The artist, on the other side of the screen, traced the outline of the head and reduced it to the desired size by means of a pantograph. Among the leading specialists in Britain were John Miers (1765–1821), regarded by many critics as the greatest of all silhouette painters, Isabella Beetham (née Robinson) (1753–1825), who worked mainly on glass, and the French-born Augustin Édouart (1789–1861), acknowledged as the finest of all silhouette cutters. He worked in England from 1814 to 1829, then emigrated to the USA. Édouart is said to have cut more than 200,000 silhouettes, and another indication of how quickly such works could be made comes from Miers's trade label; it says a sitting took only three minutes and that ‘Mr Miers preserves all the original sketches from which he can at any time supply copies without the trouble of sitting again’.

The word ‘silhouette’ derives from Étienne de Silhouette (1709–67), French finance minister under Louis XV, who was notorious for his parsimony and—according to some accounts—cut shadow portraits as a hobby; hence the phrase ‘à la silhouette’ came to mean ‘on the cheap’. In Britain silhouette portraits were generally called ‘shades’ or ‘profiles’ up to the end of the 18th century. The first recorded use of the word ‘silhouette’ in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1798, by which time the term had lost its original pejorative associations.