SILHOUETTES
The cutting of profile shadow portraits in England can be traced to a posthumous portrait of Queen Mary in 1699. However, the craze for cutting or painting ‘shades’ began in the eighteenth century and spread through Europe well into the nineteenth century. No doubt, the cutting of shades owed its origin to the Chinese tradition of jianzhi, or papercutting (see page), and the even earlier Chinese invention of pulp-strained paper.
Shades were the cheapest and most abundant form of portraiture at the end of the eighteenth century in France. The Minister for Finance under Louis XV, Etienne de Silhouette, imposed heavy taxes that forced people to buy the cheapest of everything and the French developed the phrase a la silhouette, meaning “on the cheap”, which was applied to various goods, including shades. ‘Shades’ then became ‘silhouettes’ in France, and the term quickly spread through the rest of Europe and North America. The silhouette remained the dominant popular form for portraiture outside of painting until its demise caused by the introduction of daguerreotype photography. Consequently, silhouettes account for the exclusive records of many people living during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This includes indentured African Americans for whom such portraits were used as bills of transaction by their owners.
Theologian Johann Casper Lavater is attributed with catalysing a golden age for silhouettes through his Essays on Physiognomy: For the Knowledge and Love of Mankind (1789). According to him, the character of a person could be elucidated through examining their “lines of countenance”. The most accurate of readings were facilitated by the tracing of a profile outline portrait. This contour line could be filled with black or cut from the white paper and placed over a black backing. More often, the silhouette was simply cut from black paper. In the chapter “On Shades”, Lavater wrote, “What can less the image of a living man be than a shade? Yet how full of speech! Little gold, but the purest.”
In Historia Naturalis (79 CE), Pliny the Elder wrote of the Corinthian potter Butades’s daughter drawing the shadow of her lover as cast by a lamp before he left for a battle. Of the many artworks produced in homage to this mythic tale, “Origin of Painting”, one gives a clue to the genealogical linkage of the silhouette to jianzhi in China. Painted by the German genre painter Johann Eleazar Schenau in about 1770, The Origin of Painting: A Family Making Chinese Shadows shows a family using various forms of shadow casting to make images, including the tracing of a profile shadow.
The power of the silhouette and the various Chinese papercutting traditions relates to the reduction of focus to the contour or edge, creating a binary division between light and dark, figure and ground. Taoists saw the division of light as a method of transgressing from the material to the immaterial; and the core principle of Ying and Yang, which emerged during the third century BCE, translates into English as “Light and Dark”.
Ironically, it was binaries that would catalyse the development of the digital age. This was facilitated by the perforation of Jacquard weaving loom punch cards in the early nineteenth century. Thus, the manipulation of light and dark has provided a pathway between material and immaterial worlds.
Pamela See Aug. 2019.
Thomas Holloway. Silhouette of Raynal, engraving, 15.1 x 12.8cm. in John Caspar Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, translated from the French by Henry Hunter, London: John Murray, et al., 1789, 1792 - 1798 (3 vols bound in 5) Vol. 1, 1789. Private collection.
Lavater’s caption for this image:
Take the outline from a above the bone of the eye to c on the hind-head --it will be sufficient alone to determine positively enough the principal character of the mind. An ordinary Physionomist will pronounce of what that head is capable or incapable, as soon as he has seen the very remarkable section of the profile which is between a and b; a good Observer will decide it by that which is between e and d; and finally, the real Connoisseur will need no more, to settle his judgement, than the space between a and e. (251.)
Copyright © All rights reserved