Unknown, Silhouette of a Woman, ca. 1830

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Unknown, Silhouette of a Woman, ca. 1830,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 3, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.1705.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Unknown, Silhouette of a Woman, ca. 1830,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 3, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.1705.

This intimately scaled portrait of a woman wearing the billowing leg-of-mutton sleeves and a distinctive Apollo knot hairstyle characteristic of the 1830s is not a traditional miniature but a silhouette. Silhouette portraits were typically small, like miniatures. They came into fashion in the mid-eighteenth century in one of three forms to replicate a profile: cut-out, hollow-cut, or painted, as this example is. Originating as an inexpensive parlor game, the silhouette, originally called a “profile” or “shade,” was given its name as a mockery of Étienne de Silhouette, the finance minister under French King Louis XV.¹ Silhouette’s economic reforms led to cheaply made items such as this style of portrait, often cut from paper or cardstock.

In the early nineteenth century, these economical renderings began to evolve into a discrete art form. Galvanized by a renewed interest in the art of ancient Greek and Roman “shadow painting,” physiognomy, and a growing fascination with celebrity, silhouette portraits became the preferred genre to transmit one’s features quickly and inexpensively.² Many silhouettes were either cut skillfully from dark paper and placed against a white background (cut-out silhouettes) or cut from a light paper and placed against a dark ground (hollow-cut silhouettes), but others, like this particular silhouette, were painted with watercolor on paper.

The unknown artist of this portrait added delicate gilt touches and black ink that lend a sense of three-dimensionality to the sitter’s sausage curls and bring out the subtle decorative details in her comb, jewelry, and dress. The elongated teardrop shape of her earrings identifies them as torpedo earrings, a style popularized in the 1830s as a result of recent archaeological discoveries.³ The attenuated design flattered the high hairstyles and wide necklines then in vogue. Swiftly captured and affordable for many, such silhouettes record, in broad strokes, the fashions of the era and preserve a moment in time.

Notes

1. For the origins of the term “silhouette,” see Emma Rutherford, Silhouette (New York: Rizzoli, 2009), 21–32. The terms “shade” or “portrait” were more commonly used up until the beginning of the nineteenth century. See also Sue McKechnie, British Silhouette Artists and Their Work, 1760–1860 (London: Philip Wilson for Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1978).

2. The striking “shadow painting” of ancient Greek pottery and profiles displayed on ancient Roman coins were among the silhouette’s earliest influences. See, for example, Peggy Hickman, Silhouettes, a Living Art (Exeter: David and Charles, 1968), 16.

3. Valerie Steele, The Berg Companion to Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 233.

Mr. John W. (1905–2000) and Mrs. Martha Jane (1906–2011) Starr, Kansas City, MO, by 1971;

Their gift to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1971.