Silhouettes: Outlining the people’s art

There’s something instantly nostalgic about the sight of a silhouette portrait. Typically cut or painted in a dark color against a light background, silhouettes were a cheap and popular way to capture a person’s likeness in the days before photography. But silhouettes weren’t just a way of memorializing people—they democratized art. With little more than a pair of scissors and a bit of paper, people previously shut out of making or owning art could claim a piece of creativity and permanence for themselves. While the invention of the camera in the mid-1800s may have displaced the cutout as the fastest, easiest way to make a portrait, the silhouette is still with us, continuing to prove that shadows are often more compelling than light. 🐦 [Tweet this]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( [Quartz Obsession] Silhouettes July 20, 2018 Shadow boxers --------------------------------------------------------------- There’s something instantly nostalgic about the sight of a silhouette portrait. Typically cut or painted in a dark color against a light background, silhouettes were a cheap and popular way to capture a person’s likeness in the days before photography. But silhouettes weren’t just a way of memorializing people—they democratized art. With little more than a pair of scissors and a bit of paper, people previously shut out of making or owning art could claim a piece of creativity and permanence for themselves. While the invention of the camera in the mid-1800s may have displaced the cutout as the fastest, easiest way to make a portrait, the silhouette is still with us, continuing to prove that shadows are often more compelling than light. 🐦 [Tweet this]( 🌐 [View this email on the web]( Giphy By the digits [20:]( Number of seconds it took teenage silhouette artist William James Hubard to cut a portrait of a customer in the 1820s, which he then sold for 50 cents [1699:]( Year artist Elizabeth Pyburg (or Rhijberg, depending on the account) snipped black silhouettes of England’s King William III and Queen Mary, kicking off a craze for silhouettes. Pyburg is kind of a big deal in the silhouette world: “She began things; she is like Adam and Eve,” wrote Ethel Stanwood Bolton in the 1914 book Wax Portraits and Silhouettes. [1738:]( Year that excavation began at the ruined Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii, reviving an interest in profile silhouettes like those in ancient Greek and Roman art [$2,500:]( Price paid for the 1782 conversation piece “Silhouette Portrait of Mr. Robert T. Baker and Family” at a Sotheby’s auction in January 2018 [25:]( Pounds in sterling paid in 1796 for a 19-year-old enslaved woman named Flora, whose life-size silhouette portrait is in the US National Portrait Gallery [5,560+:]( Items tagged “silhouette portrait” on the online craft marketplace Etsy.com He’s best known for his fairy tales, but legendary Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was also [an avid silhouette enthusiast]( turning out countless cuttings of whimsical figures and scenes in plain and printed paper. Reuters/Fayaz Aziz Pop quiz Which of the following is a real group of silhouette artists that works under the acronym SCONE? Shape Carvers of a New EraSilhouette Club of NebraskaSilhouette Cutters of New England Correct. It’s a small group of artists devoted to the craft in the northeastern US. Incorrect. Close, but not quite. If your inbox doesn’t support this quiz, find the solution at bottom of email. Origin story Art for all --------------------------------------------------------------- The silhouette has been with us for about as long as our shadows have been following us around. Dark figures in profile feature in art as far back as the ancient Greeks and Romans, and cut-paper folk art flourished for centuries in places like China and Mexico, often featuring decorative scenes, figures, or abstract designs. Silhouette portraiture began in Europe in the 18th century, and from there spread west to North America. Unlike painted portraits, which required a considerable investment in time, materials, and training to produce, silhouettes were a simple and cheap way to capture sitters. People kept albums of their friends and loved ones. Some of these works were produced by professional silhouette artists. The most famous was Auguste Edouart, a French portrait artist who realized his talent for silhouette-making after cutting one to prove to his friends that he could do a better job by hand than the cutting machine they were admiring. Edouart produced thousands of silhouettes in a career spent traveling Britain, Europe, and the US. Other silhouettists were a bit more… freewheeling. Silhouette cutters crisscrossed the US in the early decades of the 19th century offering their services. One particularly enterprising traveling salesman named William King offered his services as a provider of both cutout portraits and electroshock therapy. But the true genius of silhouettes were their accessibility, to artist and sitter alike. The low barriers to entry opened up the medium to people who had long been shut out by art’s official gatekeepers. Given that short, sharp blades and long handles of needlework scissors were the ideal tool for cutting details into paper, it was an art form that women could practice while homemaking. Moses Williams, a former enslaved man, created hundreds of silhouettes as an artist at the Charles Willson Peale Museum in Philadelphia. Martha Ann Honeywell, a New Hampshire woman born in 1787 without hands or forearms, cut silhouettes with a knife she held in her mouth. take me down this 🐰hole! Is the dancer spinning clockwise or counterclockwise? The answer is both. How is this possible? “All silhouettes are ambiguous,” [professor Michael Bach writes](. “Our brain tries to reconstruct the third dimension (space) from the flat image in our eyes, adding information which is usually realistic, but not really there. And in the case of a silhouette, there are two equally likely interpretations, leading to perceptual rivalry.” Giphy What’s in a name? --------------------------------------------------------------- Silhouettes as we know them weren’t called that before Étienne de Silhouette (1709–1767), a French finance minister who served under King Louis XV. Silhouette’s existence is well established; the relationship between his name and the style of profile portrait that now carries it, less so. During his brief eight-month tenure in 1759, de Silhouette embarked on an unpopular campaign to slash government spending. According [to one account]( artists started calling the simple cutout portraits offered as a cheaper alternative to expensive paintings “silhouettes,” as a play on the minister’s austerity measures. Another account says anything cheap or miserly became known as à la Silhouette. Still another (but less likely) tale is that after de Silhouette’s early retirement, he withdrew to his castle and spent the rest of his days snipping shadow portraits. To frame or not to frame? “I advise those who wish to preserve the Likenesses to have them framed as soon as possible (to avoid marring) for those who put them in Scrap-Books, I must forewarn them, it is a practice injurious to cuttings inasmuch as they are too liable to be handled and even destroyed by the rubbing of fingers.” — Silhouette artist Auguste Edouart (1789–1861), as quoted in the [2003 essay]( “Paper Profiles: American Portrait Silhouettes” by Harvard Art Museums conservator Penley Knipe Hans Wahl/Anton Kippenberg/Creative Commons Department of jargon Silhouette: The name for a shaded profile drawn or painted directly onto a surface. Hollow-cut silhouette: A profile cut from a light colored material so that a darker paper or cloth can be placed underneath. Cutout silhouette: A shape cut from dark paper or cloth and mounted onto lighter backing. Conversation piece: Cutout silhouettes showing entire families or groups gathered together, often full-length and surrounded by other household objects. Scherenschnitt: A form of cut-paper folk art originating in Germany and Switzerland, typically showing decorative scenes or designs, similar to [jianzhi in China]( and [papel picado in Mexico](. The silhouette and “science” --------------------------------------------------------------- The silhouette rose concurrently with an interest in physiognomy, the idea that a person’s traits are determined by the shape of their facial features. (Fact check: They aren’t.) Its primary proponent was a man named Johann Caspar Lavater, who believed the silhouette to be the best vehicle for examining facial traits and developed a special chair to hold subjects still as they sat for their portraits. His wasn’t the first machine created specially to make silhouettes. Gilles-Louis Chrétien in France created a tracing device in 1786. English inventor John Isaac Hawkins improved on the design with something he called a physiognotrace. To promote it, Hawkins gave the device to Charles Willson Peale to install at his museums in the northeastern US. Peale explained the machine in an 1803 letter to Thomas Jefferson: The person to be traced, setting in a Chair, rests their head on the concave part, and the hollow of the board below imbraces [sic] the shoulder. The Physiognotrace is fixed to the board, A at a, and in the center of the joint b, is a conic steel point with a spring to press it against the paper …. This index moving round to trace any subject that the edge is kept too, as it moves, the steel point of the upper joint, gives a diminished size a perfectly correct representation. The physiognotrace wasn’t the last of its kind. Over the years, various silhouette-making machines were marketed as the ediographs, limomachia, the pasigraph, the prosopographus, the profilograph, the delinator, and the delightfully named facietrace. Giphy Out of the shadows --------------------------------------------------------------- The debut of French chemist Louis Dauguerre’s camera in 1839 marked the end of the silhouette’s heyday. As photographs became cheaper and more accessible, silhouettes and other forms of portraiture faded in popularity. But the advent of new media only highlighted the dramatic power of the shadowy shape. As many a photographer has since proved, a figure captured in silhouette can be as striking as one photographed with color and contrast. This wasn’t lost on director Alfred Hitchcock, who knew that the killer in Psycho was all the more terrifying when all we saw was a shadowy outline against a white shower curtain. And the classic cut-paper silhouette still thrives as a vibrant art form. American artist [Kara Walker]( uses silhouette to explore themes of race, gender, violence, sexuality, and the history of subjugation. US scherenschnitte artist [Hannah Kohl]( snips fabulously intricate scenes using the Swiss-German paper cutting technique. An exhibit running through March 2019 at the US National Portrait Gallery entitled [“Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now”]( features centuries of art playing with shape and shadow—and there are still so many shapes to be cut. Giphy Poll Would you recognize your own silhouette? [Click here to vote]( Probably not.I would hope so—it’s my face, isn’t it?Yes, because I’ve had my silhouette portrait done before. The fine print In yesterday’s poll, 50% of you said you resist [guilt lanes]( by digging your fingernails into your own palm while silently screaming. 🤔Department of corrections: Many of you pointed out that in yesterday’s email, we wrote that the average Swiss person eats 20 pounds of chocolate a day. While we’d like to believe this is true, the correct stat is about [20 pounds a year](. Today’s email was written by [Corinne Purtill]( edited by [Adam Pasick]( and produced by [Luiz Romero](. 📫 FROM THE INBOX A few of our favorite responses to this week’s topics. Let us know what you think using the links below! Sorry for spoiling your fun fact, but I don’t think you’ll find many Norwegians actually referring to young fish as [krill](. Krill in Norwegian means just that. Yngel (or smolt in the case of the salmon-family) is the most common Norwegian term for young fish. — Øyen The actual [[krill]( fishing] figure is nearer to 200,000 tonnes— 620,000 tonnes is the upper limit of what is allowed and this figure has never been reached. The highest catches were in the early 1980s when about 500,000 tonnes were caught—but in those days there were no catch limits. — Stephen Nicol — You forgot to mention the best part of the [guilt lane]( tabloid headlines. They are the best entertainment/distraction from all the crap… — Christian — How could [you leave out the BALL]( I use one in my work all the time—soooo much better for my back and hips, and also perfect for someone who likes to have the option of moving in any of an infinitude of ways while sitting. — Larkin — Federic Tudor is my 4x great grandfather on my grandmother’s side. Every family reunion there is a great abundance of [ice cube]( jokes ever since we learned about him. One time we were in a hotel in Boston and my grandmother wanted some ice cubes with her white wine (a trademark of hers) when the waiter jokingly refused she said (jokingly) “do you know who my great great great grandfather is” we all burst out laughing but once we explained the joke to the waiter he pretended like we were royalty and brought us ridiculous amounts of ice the whole rest of the night. — Alex “the duke of ice” — You left out any reference to [Red Grange]( whose prowess, strength and stamina on the gridiron and track were attributed to his days as an [ice hauler]( or “ice toter,” perhaps apocryphally, perhaps not. Of course, nobody alive remembers Red Grange, and few alive (mostly geezer sports fans) know who Red Grange was, so all is forgiven. — Norman — This was an awesome read. 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