Over 20 years ago, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery acquired a 19th-century album filled with nearly 2,000 silhouetted portraits, including those of two former presidents.
Before exhibiting a kirigami portrait made by an itinerant artist named William Bache, the museum had to create a new, more sturdy binding for the book. That’s when the curators discovered an unusual red residue on the pages and decided to test the book to make sure it was safe to handle. I discovered that
The album was in a box until earlier this year, when curators used a grant from the Getty Foundation to digitize it.museum Bring your collection onlineLast month, everyone was able to virtually browse through the images and learn about Basche’s life and work through an interactive timeline.
Robin Azuleson, curator of prints and drawings at the museum, said researchers had identified just over 1,000 of the 1,800 portraits. We hope to be able to identify all the portraits in the collection in a realistic way.
“I realized that this book represents a lot of people who have otherwise left no portraits,” said Dr. Azuleson. “So it’s a very interesting way to look at early 19th-century American history and sort of a cross-section of society.”
At that time, the invention of photography was still several years away, and painting a portrait was time-consuming and expensive. Silhouettes were an inexpensive and accessible form of portraiture.
The 1,800 portraits represent a wide range of people, including celebrities such as Thomas Jefferson, George, and Martha Washington, as well as enslaved and former enslaved people. Portrait researcher.
“It’s rare to have a complete or extensive list of who they’ve painted,” said Dr. Verplank. “This gives us an unusual detail of life at the time.”
Bache, who moved from England to Philadelphia in May 1793, “was like a traveling salesman, but for silhouettes,” said Dr. Azuleson.
He traveled up and down the East Coast from Maine to Virginia, selling portraits for money. He eventually settled in New Orleans, where he created nearly 700 portraits of people of various origins, including French, Spanish, German, British, and Caribbean. He then went to Cuba to go door to door and offer his services. Even though he had no formal training as an artist, Bache had a solid clientele, keeping prices low and for 25 cents he offered four profiles. This equates to about $5 today.
Dr. Asleson said he could trace the contours of a human face using a facial tracer, a mechanical device that Bache modified and patented in 1803. In “mathematical correctness” without touching it. After completing the portrait, Bache added details such as curly tufts for greater accuracy.
Bache assigned a number to most of its customers. He quickly sketched their silhouettes and gave them copies, then pasted the remaining clippings into an album to create a “yearbook” of his work, Dr. Azuleson said. and wrote down each number and its corresponding name.
Dr. Asleson said that Bache started writing each name cleanly at first, but that the writing got worse over time. According to her, many of her names were written phonetically and were often misspelled.
After receiving a grant from the Getty Foundation, the museum worked with Smithsonian photographers, paper conservators, and several others to create high-resolution images of the portrait over the course of two weeks. Dr. Azuleson said each person had to wear a face mask, gloves and protective gear, and that scientists were monitoring toxin levels to make sure they were safe.
It is not known how the arsenic got onto the pages of the book, thought to be safe in small doses In the 19th century, it was commonly found in food, medicine, and even common products such as face powder.
Heather MacDonald, senior program officer at the Getty Foundation, said the project will: Paper project efforts.
“It’s emblematic of what we’re trying to do: support curators who want to take some of the hidden museum collections and make them visible so people can understand their relevance.” It’s about actually creating the framework,” she said.
Dr. Asleson and her research assistant, Elizabeth Isaacson, scanned Ancestry.com through digitized newspapers, history books, baptismal records, wills, and marriage certificates to identify people whose silhouettes appeared in the books. . After Dr. Azuleson expanded the research to include Spanish-language material and discovered that Bash had worked in Cuba, they identified even more.
About half of the people whose portraits appear in the book were identified after the gallery was published online. Dr. Azuleson said he heard from a New Orleans historian who helped curators identify some silhouettes — exactly what the researchers hoped.
Ideally, someone still has a silhouetted portrait that has been passed down through generations, and it could match one of the images in the book. The point is that as more people trace their family histories through their genetic genealogy, more bash subjects may be identified.
“We realized that it would be really interesting for people who are descendants, or who have relatives represented on this album.” think.”
