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Positive cut, full-length profile silhouette of a woman seated on a chair wearing a shawl and bonnet with gold painted highlights. Black frame.
silhouettes
paper (fiber product)
Silhouette
Silhouette portraits, or shades, as they were called, were made by tracing a sitter's shadow. They enjoyed widespread popularity from the late eighteenth century into the first four decades of the nineteenth. They not only appealed to neoclassical taste, but were relatively easy to produce, hence affordable. Some artists executed them freehand with paint or scissors; others used a mechanical device called a physiognotrace, which had been invented in France in the mid-1780s.
Original to Beauport, Sleeper-McCann House (Gloucester, Mass.),
Possibly Hankes, Master (Maker)
11 x 9 x 1/2 (HxWxD) (inches)
Gift of Constance McCann Betts, Helena Woolworth Guest and Frasier W. McCann
1942.2372
Probably
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