William Hamlet of Bath and Salisbury

AS OCTOBER IS BLACK HISTORY MONTH I feel inspired to tell the story of William Hamlet (1749–1822), a successful silhouettist working from studios in both Bath and Salisbury from the 1780s until around 1820. He referred to himself as a “profile painter” and is an artist I would love to have had a conversation with.

Hamlet’s early career received a boost in 1788 when he was asked to create a full-length silhouette of King George III while he was visiting Cheltenham. This was evidently a success as several more royal commissions followed and he lost no time in advertising himself as “Profilist to His Majesty & the Royal Family”. At the time Hamlet was based with a young family in Salisbury and was travelling to various locations around England. He advertised himself both as a profile painter and also as a drawing master offering lessons in art.

Some years earlier, in 1779, Hamlet got married to a white English woman from Salisbury called Elizabeth Morgan (1761–1832). To judge from the mark she made in the marriage register, she was probably illiterate at the time. Nevertheless, the marriage endured and they went on to have five children, all born between 1779 and 1792. Their names (in order) were William, Thomas, Elizabeth, George and Charles. Of these five, only William and Elizabeth both appear in later census records although Charles is known to have married and had children. Nothing is known about Thomas and George so it’s sadly possible that they may have died in childhood.

Hamlet’s silhouette business seems to have waxed and waned over the years. After initial success in 1788 and 1789 things went very quiet in the 1790s. Very few, if any, identifiable Hamlet silhouettes have been found from these years. It’s possible he was focusing on teaching art rather than making it. However, the silhouette business became successful again in the early 1800s when he opened his first Bath studio at 17 Union Passage.

Silhouettes at Bath Spa

Today, 17 Union Passage is home to the wonderful Botanica Studio.

In the early nineteenth century Bath was at the height of its fame as a spa town. Many people would arrive during the summer season to “take the waters” and stroll around narrow streets filled with artistic studios and shops. There were several well-established silhouette studios already in town; Hamlet would have been competing with big names of the day such as Charles Rosenberg (perhaps the most prolific Bath silhouettist of the time) and Jacob Spornberg, inventor of the Etruscan profile. It seems likely that he operated his Bath studio during the summer season and returned to his Salisbury home during the winter months. He is also known to have made off-season appearances in Oxford, Birmingham, Cheltenham and Weymouth where he found willing patronage from both nobility and ordinary working people.

As well as his core silhouette business, Hamlet developed some profitable sidelines. He sold hand-painted copies of his most famous royal silhouettes to his “subscribers”, who paid a subscription to the Bath studio, and also developed a pocket-sized device by which customers could take their own profiles. I’ve no idea what this device looked like, nor how it worked, but advertisements describe it as a “Methodical Model of an amusement, small enough to fit into a Pocket Book, and capable of taking 2 profiles in a minute”. It seems to have involved mirrors reflecting an image onto a plate, so was perhaps akin to a camera lucida? The device was available from his Bath studio for a small fee.

A father-son partnership

In 1805 Hamlet went into partnership with his eldest son, also called William, then 26 years old, who is today known as William Hamlet the younger. William became a talented artist in his own right and expanded the repertoire of silhouettes made by his father. He was instrumental in helping to run both the Bath and Salisbury studios. Trade labels from this time just say “Hamlet” so it’s now hard to tell which silhouettes were painted by the father and which by the son! Their styles were understandably very similar. William also married a woman from Salisbury in 1801, before moving to Bath. Her name was Jane Fox and they had a number of children, one of whom was called George, born in 1803.

The Hamlet father-and-son partnership gradually expanded the business and in 1810 they moved together to a more prestigious studio at 12 Union St, just around the corner from the old studio. Today, this is home to Soho Coffee, on the corner of Union St and Upper Borough Walls.

Labels from this new studio advertise prices starting from 7/6d, presumably for a silhouette painted onto paper, rising to I guinea (£1, 1/–) for a silhouette painted onto glass. Subscribers paid ½ guinea, while the DIY profile device was available for 5/–.

Arrested in America

As is sadly normal for silhouettists and other artists of the period, no portrait of Hamlet himself has ever come to light. For this reason the fact that this remarkable artist was black was entirely overlooked until quite recently: nobody really knows what he looked like. His ethnicity was revealed by the accidental discovery of a short article, published in America on 28th March 1829, in a newspaper called “Freedom’s Journal”. This was an Afro-American publication commenting on the situation of black people in the USA at the time.

The article describes how a young man called George Hamlet had been arrested in Norfolk, Virginia, as he didn’t posses the correct papers proving him to be a free man in what was then a slave-owning state. In his defence, George pointed out that he was a British citizen and that his father was the well-known William Hamlet, profile painter to His Britannic Majesty and the Royal Family!

It turns out that the father he referred to was William Hamlet the younger, making him the grandson of the elder William Hamlet.

This discovery caused a flurry of interest in the life and work of both William Hamlets amongst the silhouette-collecting fraternity. I am indebted to the work of silhouette collectors Brian Wellings and Cynthia Cunningham, whose research forms the basis of this blog. Brian was unable to find out much more about Hamlet’s ancestry, except that he was occasionally described as being “from abroad”. There is no record of where he was born or who his parents were. Brian did manage to find a one-line entry in the Bath Abbey record of baptisms for the year 1772 recording the baptism of one “William Hamlet, a negro” without parents or sponsors. Hamlet would have been 23 at the time, but how or when he arrived in England remains a mystery. There were a number of other, similarly-recorded baptisms in Bath at the time. Since there is no record that Hamlet was ever a slave there is some speculation that a number of black people arrived in the area, perhaps via Bristol, after serving with the Royal Navy in the Caribbean.

Since publishing this article I’ve been in touch with living descendant of Charles Hamlet, one of the five children of Willam and Jane, currently living in Australia. They report that Charles’ son (also called Charles) arrived in Australia in the nineteenth century. Ancestry DNA tests confirmed the presence of a small amount of African DNA in their family, originating from the Togo / Benin area on the west coast of Africa. So this may have been where either William Hamlet or his parents originated from.

William Hamlet’s silhouettes

Hamlet’s best-known silhouettes are all painted onto concave glass. He advertised that sitters need only to pose for one minute, which indicates that he was using a machine of some sort to take the profiles. He then painted the silhouettes in the studio, ready to be collected from the studio the following day.

Popular machines of the day included the shadowgraph and physiognotrace. However, Hamlet labels indicate he was using another device which he describes as a “profile reflector”, apparently involving mirrors. This was possibly a larger version of the home-profile kit he also sold in the studio! Typically, the studio would have been open for sittings for only a few hours each day, perhaps morning and evening, while the rest of the time was set aside for the artist to paint the profiles.

However it worked, the profile reflector would have created a scaled-down profile drawing on a small piece of paper. Hamlet then clipped the paper to the outside of a small piece of oval, concave glass. The drawing acted as a guide, visible through the glass, while he quickly painted the silhouette onto the inside of the concavity. He would have worked in batches, painting all of that day’s sittings in one go. As the paint dried, he then went back over the batch scraping away some paint with a needle or other sharp implement. He did this both to refine (sometimes to correct) the facial profile and also to create highlights with details of clothing and hair. This scraping technique can be easily seen if you click on the portrait of Mrs Moor above.

Finally he mounted each glass oval into a papier-maché frame and closed the back by pasting on one of his trade labels, all ready for collection by the customers when the studio next opened.

An unhappy ending

Sadly, Hamlet’s story does not seem to have ended well. His son and business partner William passed away suddenly in November 1815 at the age of just 36. He left behind a wife and five young children, aged between two & thirteen, with a sixth child arriving a few months later. It’s hard to imagine what a shock this must have been to the elder Hamlet, just as the studio was going so well.

After this the studio became a lot quieter, although there are a few labelled silhouettes by Hamlet dated 1820 which indicate he continued working at least until then. Hamlet passed away in 1822, seven years after the death of his son, at the age of 73. He was buried at Walcot Chapel, Bath, which records him as living at 79 Avon St at the time. In the 1820s Avon St was known as the poor area of Bath, notorious for its dense population and many cheap boarding houses. It was an area much favoured by impoverished artists! Despite the manifest successes of Hamlet’s career as a silhouettist, it did not translate into a secure old age for him.

Hamlet’s widow, Elizabeth, passed away in 1832, by which time she was living in her home town of Salisbury. Their grandson George, meanwhile, having secured his release from prison, went on to settle in America and make a living for himself as a musician. He is recorded in the 1850 US census as a 47-year-old “mulatto” living in Urban, Ohio.

Further information about William Hamlet

• Profiles of the Past
• Wigs on the Green
• Tania Jessep-Pond (notes on family ancestry from Australia)

I hope you’ve enjoyed Hamlet’s story. Please do share this, especially to anyone you know interested in black history. Do also leave a comment below; I always reply!