Silhouettes

Silhouette of woman, likely Louisa Wylie Boisen.

Silhouettes played a particularly important role in American society where trained portrait artists and fine art resources were scarce. Less artistically-inclined individuals could now capture the likeness of their friends and family with a candle, a pencil, paper, and a pair of scissors. While decent results could be achieved at home, one could also have their silhouette professionally traced very inexpensively.

Itinerant artists would travel the country, offering to cut silhouettes portraits for a small fee. The Peale Museum in Philadelphia began selling hollow-cut silhouette portraits in 1814 which quickly became a popular and inexpensive souvenir. The Peale Museum made use of the recently-invented physiognotrace, a device that mechanized the silhouette process and produced a miniaturized copy of the sitter’s portrait in real-time.

Wylie House has two portraits from the Peale Museum that can be identified from the embossed museum stamp below the portrait. One depicts Mary Malvina Dennis, a relative of the Wylies.

A hollow-cut silhouette portrait of an unknown man with painted embellishments.

Styles of Silhouette Portraits

The Peale Museum produced "hollow-cut" silhouettes, meaning that the shape of the sitter is cut from an unmarked piece of paper. The positive cut-out of the silhouette is discarded, and the remaining paper bearing the negative outline of the sitter is mounted on a dark background. 

Alternatively, silhouettes could be made using a "cut out" technique, wherein the positive images of the sitter is cut from a paper that had been inked or painted. The dark, positive silhouette would then be mounted on a supporting sheet of light-colored paper.

Less commonly, silhouettes would be accentuated with painted details. Wylie House has one such example in our collection. This style required a bit more artistic ability than the more straightforward, unembellished silhouette.

Peale and the Physiognotrace

At the Peale Museum and amongst some itinerant artists, the process of producing portrait silhouettes was made entirely mechanical through the use of a physiognotrace. This device was composed of a chair, a screen, a stylus, and four wooden arms with a pencil forming a pantograph. The George Eastman Museum staged an excellent recreation of this device that is viewable here.

By lighting and positioning a candle behind the sitter, the silhouette artist could trace a perfect, crisp outline of the intended silhouette with a stylus. Simultaneously, the attached pantograph would copy the silhouette in miniature on a sheet of paper mounted above. Finishing the silhouette was then as simple as following the line and pasting the result on a dark backing.

Contemporary Inspiration

Artist Sarah Edmands Martin took inspiration from the Wylie House silhouette collection when creating her stop-motion animation Where the Shadow Falls. In this video, Martin explores the life of Margaret Wylie Mellette, a young woman with artistic aspirations that were ultimately shelved in order to fulfill the obligations of 19th century domesticity and motherhood.

A still from this animation can be seen above. Follow this link to view Martin's installation of Where the Shadow Falls in full at Wylie House Museum when it was exhibited in 2020.