I SPEND SO MUCH TIME writing and researching unknown and obscure silhouette artists that the question “who are the best known silhouette artists?” rather threw me. The art of the silhouette portrait is, on the one hand, ubiquitous. We see silhouettes everywhere, yet few people know much about the artists who made them.
Given that almost everyone is familiar with these small black cameos, perhaps it’s time to put the record straight and list a few artists who created the most exceptional silhouettes in their day.
The Great Silhouette Artists of History
Six artists who shaped the art form, chosen from a lifetime of research.
Augustin Amant Constant Fidèle Edouart (1789–1861)
Edouart’s long and pompous name tells you much about his character. In 1815 he arrived in England, from France, as a refugee from the Napoleonic wars. He had a large family in tow and no means of making a living, so tried his hand at various kinds of art. He stumbled across silhouettes (or shades as they were then known in England) whilst having dinner with a friend, who showed him some machine-made shades he had recently had made.
“Bah, I could better with a common pair of scissors!” remarked Edouart.
Not to be outdone, scissors and paper were found and his bluff was called. To the friend’s great surprise Edouart’s first silhouette was indeed much more lifelike and interesting than any shades he had ever seen.
This was the start of a long and interesting career spanning over quarter of a century. The tall Frenchman spent 15 years establishing his art practice from studios in Cheltenham. From there he travelling all over England, Scotland and Ireland making silhouettes from temporary studios set up in many small towns and cities.
Edouart was the first artist to insist on cutting freehand with scissors as the best way to make a portrait, which was revolutionary at the time. He was also the first artist to describe himself as a “silhouettist”, preferring to use the French word “silhouette” to describe his cuttings. He did this in order to distinguish them from what he regarded as “inferior English shades” and is thus credited with bringing the French word “silhouette” into the English language.
Edouart kept a duplicate copy of every silhouette he ever cut, noting down the date, location and sister’s name. These were complied into large folio albums in his studio. I’ve always admired his meticulous approach to data, and wrote about it separately here.
In 1839 he travelled to America, setting up a new studio in New York and bringing with him his accumulated collection of duplicate cuttings. He spent another ten years travelling up and down the East Coast of America, cutting silhouettes of many notable public figures of the time. His freehand cutting technique sent a strong signal to other artists working in America, where he is today known as the “Father of Silhouette”.
Hubert Leslie (1890–1976)
This artist has a special place in my heart, as I’ve always regarded him as first teacher (even though I never met him).
Like me, Hubert Leslie began his career as a street artist, working from a booth on Brighton Pier. He was a veteran of the Great War and is generally considered the best of a new generation of English artists who revived the art of silhouette cutting in the 1920s.
Taking his cue from August Edouart, Leslie always worked freehand with scissors and always kept duplicate copies of all his silhouettes. He pasted these copies directly into albums as he worked, asking the sitter to write their own name under each “for posterity”.
Today these albums reside in the archives at the National Portrait Gallery in London. They provide a fascinating snapshot of English life in the 1920s and 30s, and for me provided an essential learning tool when I first began to cut silhouettes myself in the 1990s. You can find out more about these duplicate albums (which I visited in the opening scenes of Silhouette Secrets) on the NPG website.
As well as cutting silhouettes, Leslie was an accomplished entertainer, with a stage act combining feats of juggling, paper cutting and alliterative puzzles. He toured all over England, mostly visiting schools, an experience he wrote extensively about in his book Artful Art and Breathless Brainwaves.
The photo inset comes from his calling card, with the caption “May Fortune always smile on you, Like me – from (y)ear to (y)ear.” It shows clearly his mischievous, friendly character and tells me he’s a man I’d love to have met and swapped a cutting or two with.
John Miers (1758–1821)
The Miers & Field Studio operated from Strand in London in the late eighteenth century. It was founded by John Miers, who was later joined by a second artist, John Field. There were many such studios in London at the time, many of them in the area around One Aldwych, but this was widely regarded as the most prestigious.
John Miers made what are today regarded as classic, Georgian, English shades. They were taken by candlelight, using a shadowgraph screen, before being reduced to one-eighth scale by a pantograph. Miers then hand painted them, using a mixture of beer and soot, onto either card or plaster as the client asked.
His portraits on plaster are truly beautiful and I wrote more about them on a separate blog.
The full-size shadow drawings were kept in the studio, enabling clients to return later to have new copies of their silhouettes painted. These were available in a wide variety of frames, as well as at smaller scales for lockets and jewellery pieces.
Today, most collectors of silhouettes have one or two by Miers in their collection. The sheer quantity available rather reduces their value, but also speaks to the enormous success and popularity of the studio at the time.
Moses Williams, the slave silhouettist (c.1777–1825)
If you visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art today you made see a reproduction of an extraordinary silhouette-making machine known as the physiognotrace. This machine was commissioned by an artist and collector called Charles Wilson Peale (1741–1827) who installed it in what was then known as the Peale Museum.
Peale was a busy man, so after using the machine for a short while he handed over production of silhouettes to a family slave called Moses Williams. Williams was good at the job and quickly earned a reputation as a talented artist, making many thousands of silhouettes.
The silhouettes he made were hollow cuts, meaning they were cut inside out from white paper and then mounted onto black paper or fabric to create the silhouette. The machine first traced an outline onto the white paper, which the artist then stabbed with the points of the scissors and cut away from the inside, often making several copies at once. Anybody who has ever tried this will know it’s not so easy; the machine wasn’t very accurate and gave only the vaguest of lines to follow. The truth is that Williams took these odd tracings and breathed new life into them using with the skill of his scissor work.
None of his silhouettes are signed, but can be recognised by the “Museum” stamp embossing all silhouettes made at the museum. A few early silhouettes carry a different stamp, reading “Peale”, and these are generally accepted to by Charles Peale, the owner of both museum and slave.
Although born into slavery, Williams did earn a small commission for each profile he cut. He eventually earned enough to buy his freedom (known then as manumission), marrying the Irish cook and buying a small house in Philadelphia.
Isabella Beetham (1753–1825)
Working from her first-floor, Fleet Street studio, above her husband’s washing machine showroom, Beetham managed to make a name for herself as one of London’s premier Georgian silhouette artists.
This was unusual at the time, since the world of art and business was almost entirely dominated by men. Women generally ran their husband’s households or worked in the service sector. Very few ran their own careers as artists. For this reason Beetham can today be regarded as something of feminist icon.
Her silhouettes, like those by John Miers, were taken using a shadow tracing, which Beetham advertised as taking as little as three minutes. Her silhouettes were then either cut from paper or painted onto card or glass. Her portrait of Marie Antoinette reveals much about the way she worked, which I wrote about in more detail here.
Beethem encouraged her clients to return year after year for a new silhouette. These could be made from the original shadow tracing, without the need for a further sitting, and “dressed” in the new year’s latest fashion, with different hats and collars as needed.
Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801)
This poet and writer, although not himself a silhouettist, is intimately connected with the art of silhouette. His book A Treatise on Physiognomy, first published in 1775 was hugely influential and massively increased the popularity of silhouette studios all over Europe. His central idea (now widely discredited as pseudo-science) was that the profile can be “read” to determine a person’s character, in much the same way that a palm reader can determine your fortune from reading lines on your hand.
The book caused a craze for silhouettes as people rushed to have their profiles taken and read by physiognomists. This idea was so commonplace that people came to refer to this process as “being profiled”. This is the reason the word “profile” still has this odd double meaning today, referring both to your character profile and the shape or your face, seen sideways. I talk more about this strange snippet of history in my TEDx talk The Eighteenth Century Selfie.
Silhouette Artists in the Modern Era
Most collectors of silhouette regard the heyday of silhouettes as being from roughly 1760–1860. This is the encompassing both the late eighteenth century craze for silhouettes and the invention of photography, many decades later, which brought an end to it. As photography became both faster and cheaper in the 1850s, silhouettists found it harder and harder to make a living. Many of them actually put away their physiognotace machines and bought cameras instead, becoming some of the earliest photographers. They probably regarded such an investment as a simple technological upgrade!
My own research has uncovered a second heyday of the portrait silhouette, which began slowly in the 1890s and latest throughout the early twentieth century. This “second wave” of artists began by cutting simple portrait profiles and sticking them onto postcards in city centres all over Europe. Later artists like Hubert Leslie developed these freehand cutting techniques to new levels.
Today, as one of the few silhouette artists working today, almost all my work involves freehand cutting. People love to watch the process, which seems to act as an antidote to the street of the digital, AI-dominated world in which we all find ourselves. The immediacy of the process can come as quite a shock, with some people not quite believing what they are seeing. Although the art can seem so fresh and immediate, I’ve always loved that it has such a deep, rich, and often unexplored history.
What Makes a Great Silhouette Artist?
Silhouette is a living art. Like all living arts it needs to change and grow. When I look at the great silhouette artists of history they all have one thing in common: they have taken the art and reinvented it for themselves in some way. Silhouette cutting is a difficult art to master, but once mastered it’s important for an artist to make it their own in some way.
Over thirty years I’ve observed the careers of a number of artists who’ve experimented with freehand silhouette cutting, some with more success than others. Many improve quite quickly to a point where they cut a competent silhouette portrait quite quickly, but after that they stop improving. They seem to reach a point where they are satisfied, happy to receive many compliments from their clients. However, the most interesting artists, and the ones whose work I most enjoy, are those who seem driven to continually improve their own work, constantly striving to find a new expression for this ancient art.
Experience a Silhouette Artist for Yourself
I sincerely believe the everybody should have their silhouette cut at least once in their life. Sadly, with so few silhouettists in the world today, I know this isn’t really possible. In thirty years I’ve cut just over quarter of a million portraits. This may sound like a lot, but I’m keenly aware that in a world of 8.3 billion people I’ve only just scratched the surface!
However, it you’re reading this, there’s a chance you can be one of the lucky few. Most of my silhouettes are cut at events and parties of one kind or another, while those wanting silhouettes of themselves or their families can take advantage of modern technology and book an online sitting using a video link. I really enjoy this way of working and so run online events each month which I call my Mays Barn Studio Days.
