Anna Woodbury of Hooksett, New Hampshire, includes a chained lock of her hair. below John and Jane Rundlet of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
The silhouette is not signed, but it, and a very similar image of Elizabeth’s father, are attributed to Doyle based on similar cut paper examples with signatures and a consistent style. In 1803 Doyle introduced a “profile machine” at his Columbian Museum in Boston, placing an advertisement in the local papers announcing its display and offering to cut profiles gratis for visitors. Doyle continued to cut and paint silhouettes as well as draw portraits in pastel until his death in 1828. In his last two decades, his daughter, Margaret Byron Doyle, joined him in the business. One of her few known works is a portrait of Mrs. Hiram Bingham, signed “MB Doyle” in a hand very similar to her father’s. Like her father, Margaret Doyle used ink and a fine brush to paint Mrs. Bingham’s hair and frilled collar. Most American silhouette artists produced cut profiles, either freehand with scissors or with a physiognotrace. Cut silhouettes were placed on contrasting backgrounds. When the artist cuts out the center of the paper and removes it, the negative space is called a hollow cut, while the removed section is known as a positive cut or blockhead. After mounting the silhouette on contrasting silk or paper, the artist could
embellish it with penciled or painted details. Some of the most celebrated English cutters toured America in the nineteenth century, giving demonstrations of their art. The teenaged Master Hubard drew crowds of visitors to his exhibition of cut paper images, called Papyrotamia, when he visited America in 1825. A freehand genius with scissors, he could cut a full-length rendering in under a minute. Hubard was particularly proud of his animal portraits, like the ones in the silhouettes of a gentleman with his chubby spaniel and a lady training her cockatoo. Traveling silhouette cutters frequently attracted crowds of onlookers to their exhibitions, but few artists could compete with Saunders Ken Grems Nellis. Born without arms, Nellis used his toes to cut silhouettes and paper pictures, play the cello, wind a watch, and even shoot with a bow and arrow. Nellis toured the world from the 1830s to the 1860s, but few of his works have survived. As silhouettes rose in popularity, American artists developed exuberant free-form interpretations of this somewhat rigid art form. Cutters such as the Puffy Sleeve Artist (so named for the distinctive, flat paintings of women wearing dresses with exaggerated sleeves), Everet Howard, Justin Salisbury, and James Holsey Whitcomb added color and personal verve to their work. Howard embellished his silhouette of sixteen-year-old Anna Woodbury with distinctive cuts in the bust line that typify his style. William Bache and William King, two skillful American profile cutters, spent time in northern New England. Bache, who stamped his works “Bache’s Patent,” visited Salem, Massachusetts, at least twice, where he made cuttings of Captain Stephen Phillips and two young children. He embellished both works with delicate details in China white, an opaque pigment that he occasionally used to enhance his silhouettes. William King, who traveled extensively in the region, boasted he had cut more than 20,000 silhouettes in less than two years. He set up shop in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Portland; Maine, and other regional centers. Auguste Edouart, a French artist who traveled along America’s eastern seaboard, produced thousands of silhouettes between 1839 and 1845. Credited with being the first to apply the term silhouette to this type of portraiture, Edouart specialized in family and conversational groupings. He usually cut full-length figures, unlike the bust-length silhouettes favored by most artists, often placing them against a lightly sketched interior or landscape rendered in three dimensions. Today Edouart’s works are highly prized by scholars for the precise documentary evidence they contain about the sitter’s home. Edouart was not the only artist to produce full-length silhouettes set in customized backgrounds. Charleston-born Spring 2012 Historic New England
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