The heyday of the silhouettes is usually considered roughly 1760-1860. The range of work is huge and varied and these posts show.
Watching the news of Russian forces rolling into Ukraine a fortnight ago I was embarrassed to realise just how little I knew about the country. I had to look it up on a map! What’s the history, I wondered. Why is this happening? I found I knew almost nothing about either Ukrainian culture or history.
WHO ON EARTH was Mrs Ames? It’s a good question. Considering that only one pair of silhouettes painted by her has ever been identified, researchers have written a surprising amount about this artist (or artists).
IT’S ONLY BY an accident of history that anybody knows anything about the silhouettist William Allport at all. He was a workman-like artist…
SAMUEL ANDREWS’ rather ghostly white en-grisaille cameos occupy that strange overlap between silhouette and portrait miniature.
THE FRENCHMAN known as “Monsieur Adolphe” was quite a character. Was he responsible for the myth that silhouettes are a French art?
THE ADELAIDE GALLERY is more famous for its innovations in Daguerreotype than for silhouette cutting. Nevertheless, a number of silhouettists seem to have worked there. The London gallery was active in the mid nineteenth century.
LAST WEDNESDAYI picked up an eighteenth-century silhouette by Isabella Beetham. Beetham is a well-known Georgian artist and her work is much prized by collectors today. She is something of a feminist icon. She is one of very few eighteenth-century female artists to build a successful career in the male-dominated art world of her time. I came
YOU MIGHT ASSUME that the market for guest speakers on silhouettes would occupy the tiniest of niches in a niche of the already niche market for speaker about art! Yet silhouettes touch a deep nerve in all of us.
