Did Monsieur Silvar ever really exist?

COLLECTING OLD SILHOUETTES can sometimes make me feel I’m in a late-night TV detective series. The tendency of street artists to never sign their own work has led me on many a wild-goose chase!

One example of this is the work of the elusive Monsieur Silvar, an unknown artist who worked on the streets of Paris, as well as at a variety of fêtes around France, from the 1890s until at least 1911. To judge by the sheer quantity of his work which appears on online auction sites he was incredibly prolific. This probably means he worked fast and sold his silhouettes cheap.

Identifying Monsieur Silvar silhouettes

The problem is that, as far as I can tell, he never once signed his work. Nevertheless, once you become familiar with his style, his work is easy to spot. His women all have improbably large busts, often with a distinctive forward “flick” at the bottom. They tend to be far larger than his men, who appear weedy and insignificant by comparison. The men usually have a single curve under the shoulder, leading to a flat and usually horizontal base line. He rarely (if ever) includes an eyelash and tends to cut noses a little too long. All his silhouettes come mounted on blank, French postcards often postmarked Paris or North–West France. Despite his sell-em-cheap approach the faces are sensitively cut at quite a small scale.

The only clue to the artist’s name comes from a single silhouette, above which the sitter obligingly wrote:

Ma Silhouette, faite par M. Silvar Silhouettiste á “l’Olympia” à Paris

“My silhouette, made by Mr Silvar, silhouettist at The Olympia, Paris.”

Underneath, he then signed his own name (which I can’t read) and dated the card 3rd August 1907. The card has been stamped, postmarked and posted to an address in France, written on the back.

The Olympia is a concert venue in the area of Paris known as Opéra. It was opened in 1893, by one of the two co-creators of the Moulin Rouge venue, so in 1907 would still have been relatively new. It saw many opera, ballet, and music hall performances up until the 1920s when it was converted into a cinema. Today, it has been extensively refurbished and is a popular concert venue.

The day I saw this silhouette was a happy day. It felt like a revelation: I could at last put a name to so many anonymous French cuttings! However, I remained puzzled: although many artists frequently fail to sign or label their work, it’s relatively unusual for them to sign none of their work. Sooner or later a signed example always turns up, if only because some clients will insist on the artist adding a signature.

Silvar’s working method.

I’ve no idea whether Mr Silvar was working inside the Olympia or entertaining crowds queuing to get in. Either scenario is possible. I do know that when working at fêtes around France he would have set up a stall there, so was used to selling his silhouettes direct to the public. Various similar silhouettes turn up marked as being cut at Abbeville (1906), Saint Lô, Normandy (undated), Neuilly, N.W. Paris (1908), Saint Romain, Rouen (1911) as well as various locations within Paris.

Silvar liked cutting white collars into his silhouettes, especially for his men. These are often cut right through the paper, bisecting the silhouette. The two halves are then reassembled while pasting them onto a postcard.

Like most silhouettists of the period he supplied at least two copies of each silhouette, mounting them on separate cards in opposite directions. A couple might thus obtain two pairs of face-to-face silhouettes, one to keep for themselves and another to send to family or friends.

A wild-goose chase or two.

Before I saw the Olympia silhouette there a number of false leads in my search for the name of this artist. Two silhouettes, looking very like Silvar’s work, arrived as a pair and are obviously signed by the same hand. The first word is “souvenir” but I can’t read the signature.

I find I need to be careful when looking at signed (as opposed to labelled) silhouettes, since people routinely sign their own likenesses. Therefore, it’s hard to be sure whether a signature is that of the artist or the sitter. My usual rule is to assume it’s the name of the sitter until I see a second silhouette with the same signature. Yet, here are two silhouettes with the same signature.

It’s possible that, being a couple, the man signed both silhouettes with their joint name. The word “souvenir” makes it also possible that the signature is actually the name of a place and not a signature at all (although it does look like a signature). A third possibility, noting that the woman has an eyelash and that both noses are shorter than usual, is that this is the work and signature of a different artist. However, the man especially looks like Silvar’s work.

A grubby but eerily-similar woman’s silhouette (minus eyelash) then turned up bearing a “VA” stamp. Is this an artist’s stamp, or has the sitter added her own stamp? I’m currently assuming the latter unless I see another silhouette with the same stamp.

I’ve now dismissed both lines of enquiry as wild-goose chases. This happens a lot when trying to untangle the lives of undocumented artists.

Was Silvar illiterate?

A more likely possibility is that the artist never signed or labeled his own work because he was unable to do so.

First one, then another silhouette turned up bearing a neatly-written letter X. Since these two silhouettes are not related to each other, I now believe it’s possible that when clients pressed Mr Silvar to sign his work (as I know from experience they will do from time to time) he would carefully add his “mark” under the silhouette, being unable to sign his own name.

Some time ago, I showed one of these silhouettes to Adam Brand, an old friend of mine and talented graphologist. However, he felt that the X was unlikely to have been written by an illiterate person. He pointed out that it was carefully and tremulously written, with four horizontal serifs placed “just so” at each corner of the X. He also felt that somebody capable of working so sensitively with scissors was unlikely to have also been illiterate.

In the 1900s illiteracy rates were steadily falling in France, from a high of around 25% in the 1870s to just 5% by 1910. In large part this was fuelled by the introduction of free, compulsory education in the 1880s. This meant that literacy rates were, for a time, higher among younger generations (those who went to school in the 1880s or later) but remained lower than average among older generations.

Was Monsieur Silvar one of those older Frenchmen who, despite his evident artistic sensitivity, simply missed out on a proper education?

And who on Earth is J. Laforge?

This post was inspired, in part, by the recent discovery of a silhouette of a woman clearly labeled “J. LAFORGE, Artiste Silhouettiste”. There’s no date, but the woman’s costume indicates the same period as Silvar’s work. The stylistic similarities are obvious: there’s the large bust, complete with forward flick at the bottom. There’s the small-scale face and the white collar cut into the black paper.

My immediate reaction was that the mystery was finally solved. There never was an M. Silvar, just a J. Laforge, about whom I know nothing, not even their gender. But then I began to notice some odd differences, apart from the professional printed card. The most obvious was an eyelash added in pencil. I’ve never seen this on any other Silvar silhouette (and I’ve collected a lot of them).

I placed my new Laforge silhouette next to some Silvar cuttings. There is the long nose, but is it my imagination, or does the cutting of the face seem a little less sensitive? And what about the collar? Rather than cut right through the paper, this one seems to have been stabbed into the paper with a scissor point, and quite roughly at that.

Overlapping doubles

My next act (of course) was to google J. Laforge silhouettes. As usual, there was no information about the artist, but I did find poor-quality images of two other silhouettes mounted on identical printed cards.

Both silhouettes show a couple cut side by side and mounted on a single card. I’ve never seen any Silvar silhouette cut this way. This style of cutting is known as an “overlapping double”. Although I don’t generally make silhouettes this way myself, it is a popular style among contemporary silhouettists, especially in America. If you have ever visited the Silhouette Studio in Disneyland you will have seen it many times! I’d always assumed the overlapping-double style was invented by Paul Krüger, who started the first studio in Disneyland and who often cut silhouettes this way (more about him later). However, Krüger was cutting silhouettes in the 1930s, whereas these look like they were cut in the 1890s or 1900s. They’re possibly the oldest overlapping-double silhouettes on record.

I was so surprised to see them that I got out my scissors to make a copy. This is something I like to do when I encounter an interesting or unusual silhouette. I find it helps me get inside the head of the artist and to learn (in an odd, unscientific way) a bit more about them.

However, instead of finding more differences between Silvar and Laforge, cutting these silhouettes made me more and more aware of the many similarities between their work. Every curve, every corner, felt like it was cut by the same hand. Everything felt somehow reminiscent of Silvar’s work. Am I looking at the work of two artists or one?

Slowly, I can feel my vision of this elusive artist as a kindly-but-illiterate elderly Frenchmen, cutting silhouettes of large-chested women at fêtes around France, melting away. Did Monsieur Silvar ever really exist? Or was he always just a mirage, conjured up by a drunken concert goer on a Parisian street in 1907?

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Postscript

Added 8th August 2025 / by Charles Burns

This blog generated a lot of interest, including from a collector in Germany who sent me this extraordinary photograph. He had found it online, some time ago, and pointed out that the silhouettes on the artist’s signboard looked at lot like Silvar’s work.

This photograph excited me greatly. As an ex street artist myself I immediately recognised a fellow artist! Here was somebody I’d love to have met and had a conversation with; I’d love to know more about the life he led.

The artist is striking a confident pose, with one foot on a stool, looking straight out at the camera. He has a wonderful moustache and a hat brim pulled low over his eyes. To the right of the signboard is a woman looking quizzically at the camera. Is she a customer or possibly the artist’s assistant? Behind the artist stands a boy with a cap, looking like he is waiting in line to have his silhouette cut. Behind the signboard are passers by at a fête, and what looks like a stadium with the canopies of various stalls in front of it.

It took me a while to work out why the artist has his foot on that rather rickety stool. Was it just a habitual, jaunty pose? Then I realised that the stool was placed firmly over the lower bar of his easel. He was probably trying to prevent his over-tall signboard from blowing over in the breeze. I know from long experience how easily this can happen!

It’s hard to say whether this is Silvar, Laforge, or maybe another of various artists who may have been working around France at the same time. I’d like to think it’s Silvar (even though he seems to be a very different character than I had imagined) but it’s impossible to be certain without seeing another photo of the artist. However, the signboard intrigued me greatly, so I went to work in Photoshop so see if I could make it any clearer.

The only clear text on the board are the numbers 3 and 0.30. After playing around with scale and contrast the line above also became clear: CARTES POSTALES (postcards). This at least confirms that this is a French artist. The top line is too faint to decipher with any certainty, but I think I can see a capital “P” at the start and a larger “S” in the centre. My best guess would be “Portraits Silhouettes”, so the sign probably reads:

Portraits Silhouettes
CARTES POSTALES
3 pour 0,30

This tells me a lot about the way the artist was working. 

He was cutting through three sheets of paper (rather than two) thus making three copies of each silhouette. These were then glued onto three separate postcards, either by the artist or by an assistant.

Even in the 1900s, 30¢ (30 centimes) would have been very cheap, worth only €2 or €3 in today’s money. For comparison, the postage stamps attached to many of Silvar’s silhouettes cost either 5¢ or 10¢. So each of the three postcards was the same price as a postage stamp!

It confirms my suspicion that M. Silvar worked fast and sold his silhouettes cheap. If he could cut 100 silhouettes in a day (as I can) he would be making between €200 and €300 today, which is perhaps not too bad. Against this he probably had to pay somebody a small bribe to work at the fair, travel costs and local cheap accommodation when working out of town, as well as material costs: cheap, blank postcards (three per portrait) + glue and black paper. Could he have afforded an assistant to help him paste the silhouettes?

To cut three copies the artist took a long sheet of black paper and folded it into three (like folding a letter into an envelope) with the white side outermost. This would give him two copies facing in one direction and one the other. Three sheets of paper was probably the most the artist felt he cut comfortably cut through without hurting his wrist. This is an aspect of the work I can relate to.

The low price would have encouraged casual passing trade to stop for a silhouette both at local town fairs and when working on the streets of Paris. I’ve often speculated that the big problem with the silhouette-postcard business (from an artist’s point of view) is the low perceived value of the postcards themselves. The fact that he was offering postcards – as the main selling point on his signboard – would have meant he could not charge much more than the price of ordinary photographic postcards, which were so popular at the time. It looks like he embraced this price limit and solved it by working as fast as possible. Supplying three copies at least allowed him to charge a price equivalent to three postcards, rather than one. 

The price also explains why Silvar never printed postcards with his name on. This would have massively increased the material costs. It’s also the reason he never signed his own name: signing 300 cards a day just takes too long!

Looking at this photograph, and other comments I received after writing this blog, I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that the huge numbers silhouettes I’ve seen, all mounted on blank French postcards, which could be attributable to Silvar are made by more than one artist. Since they are stylistically so similar, it’s likely that these artists all knew each other, much as silhouettists working in Montmartre do today. If selling 3 copies for 30¢ was common practice it explains both the large numbers of such silhouettes which exist, as well why they are virtually all anonymous.