He also lays great stress on the proportions in the figure of the sitter,
which can be shown only in the full-length. Some have a long body and
small legs, others long legs and a short body; in fact, everything in
nature varies, and all these variations help to make the portrait of the
individual, and not the features alone. Beauty, he continues, has respect
to form. Now, one part of a figure may exhibit a beautiful form, and
yet that figure may not be well proportioned throughout. For instance,
a man may have a handsome leg, or arm, considered in itself, but the
other parts of his figure may not equal this part in beauty, or this part
may not be accurately proportioned to the rest of the figure; and so on
through many pages, in which Edouart proves to his own satisfaction that,
in order to give a correct shade likeness of a person, it is necessary to
portray the whole and not one part only of that person. He goes further,
and maintains that, as the manner of dress is often as characteristic as
the gait, what is most usual for the sitter to wear should be depicted.
Edouart’s portraits are to be found in many parts of the British Isles
and the United States of America, for his custom was to take up his
abode in a town, to advertise in the papers, and to stay there while he
took the silhouette portraits of the surrounding gentry and noblemen.
Quite early in his career, his albums of duplicates contained 50,000
(the late Mr. Andrew Tuer computes them at 100,000) portraits, so that
his whole output must have been enormous. He seems to have worked with
great method, keeping a note of “the names of the persons I take, and
the dates. These are written five times over—first, on the duplicate of
the likeness; secondly, in my day book; thirdly, in the book in which
I preserve them; fourthly, in the index of that book; and fifthly, in
the general index. Without this arrangement, how could I at a minute’s
notice tell whether I had taken the likeness of any person enquired for,
and could it be otherwise possible to produce the silhouette, or to know
from about 50 books, folio size, and above 50,000 likenesses, if I had
taken the one required?”
The value of such method and classification, when some of these long-lost
volumes came to the writer for identification, can be imagined. The
story of the romance of the lost folios is too long a one to include
in a general chapter on silhouette cutters and their work. It will
appear in its place elsewhere, together with a notice of some of the
extraordinarily interesting groups of famous people, especially those
of the United States, where presidents and senators, public officials,
professional men, famous characters, their wives and children, appear in
startling sequence, crowded with order and method on to the pages of the
numerous large volumes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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