Despite the opinion of Edouart, with which most connoisseurs of the
present day heartily agree, much silhouette work was finished in colour.
We have before us a delicately painted lady of the Early Victorian
period. She wears a grey dress with graceful pleated sleeves, a deep
embroidered muslin collar, and the most bewitching cap tied with blue
ribbons. Her face and hands only are shadow black. The delightful
ringlets of the period are marked in gold, and she is writing in a
note-book with a gold pencil, quite a blue-stocking occupation for a lady
of that period. In the collection of Dr. A. Figdor, Vienna, there is an
elaborate picture of a mother with a young child on her knee; two elder
children and her husband complete the group. Only the heads in this group
are black. Again, Professor Paul Naumann, of Dresden, owns the silhouette
of a Moor. The clothing is brightly coloured, the head alone black. Every
collector will find he has some examples where colour has been used to
relieve the black of the card, ivory, or glass painting.
It must be remembered that this was the time of glass pictures of the
ordinary coloured type, and this glass painting—_Églomisé_, as the
process is called by the learned Dr. Leisching—would naturally influence
the minds of the profile portrait painter on glass. So it came about
that the two allied crafts gradually overlapped in ideas, and method and
points of colour began to appear in uniform or other parts of the picture
where colour would obviously add interest of a historical or sentimental
character to the silhouette portrait, and in the glass picture of saint
or Bible history. The glaring colours hitherto used to appeal to the
popular taste began to be modified, and examples are found where the
figures are all in black, the background alone being coloured; so that
the glass picture is to all intents and purposes a silhouette on a
coloured ground.
Of this type is the picture at the Francesco Carolinum Museum at Linz,
where eight musicians in uniform are shown in black in the chapel. There
is a good deal of wreath and ribbon decoration, and two small curtained
windows are in the background.
An important example of the black glass painting on coloured ground is
the picture on a red ground in the Berlin Museum. Other red and black
silhouette works are owned by Lady Sackville, who has an extraordinarily
interesting collection of the Ansley family, painted by Spornberg in
1793. Each portrait is signed and dated, the address of the artist, No.
5, Lower Church Street, Bath, being given on one. These pictures are
painted on convex glass in black; the background, outlines of the face,
dress, hair, and elaborate wigs, caps and hats, together with the eyes,
and slight shading, being painted in black. Over the whole an orange red
paint is then worked in at the back, so that one sees from the front the
red bust figure shown in black lines on the black background.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN ROBERT CONIG
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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