If fresh interest is kindled in the graceful art of the silhouettist, and the names of some little known artists are rescued from oblivion, my pleasant task will not have been in vain. Perhaps those who read these pages will find a charm and wistfulness in the shadow portrait. Beauty is not alone recorded by the brush of great artists, but also by minor workers. Gainsborough painted portraits of beautiful women at Bath, and Charles and Spornberg worked at their shades in the same street; the same clients visited both studios. The silhouette, poor relation of the miniature, the forerunner of Daguerre, shows the Belle of Cheltenham, or the Dandy of Bath and the Wells, appealing and dainty in shadowland, while the laughter of the shadow children echoes ghost-like as we note their toys and sports; they flit across the pages, they cast a shadow, and are gone. E. J. _Oak Lodge, Sidcup._ CHAPTER I. BLACK PROFILE PORTRAITURE: ITS PLACE IN ART, LITERATURE, AND SOCIAL LIFE. Figures in black profile join hands round the wine-cups and oil-jars made by Etruscan potters; in silhouette men are armed to battle, women weave cloth and grind corn, children play at ball and knuckle-bones, life-like in shadow. There is a pageant of profile portraiture on the mummy cases and frescoed tombs of ancient Egypt. Strange peoples are shown in outline as they lived; they go to war, they marry, their children play, the ritual of their Book of the Dead is pictured in profile three thousand years before the Christian era. These flat and unsubstantial ghost figures come to us down the ages. From those mystic times when Crates of Sicyon, Philocles of Egypt, and Cleanthes of Corinth first worked in monochrome, there is an unbroken tale of men and women who have lived, loved, hated, and triumphed—Pharaohs and their slaves, Greek gods, and athletes; a French king, a murdered queen; Napoleon and his generals; statesmen and politicians; Goëthe, Beethoven, Burns, Wellington, Dickens, Washington, Harrison, Scott, and ten thousand others down to the present day. They come as colourless ghosts, relics of bygone men and women, shadows caught and held, while the realities have flitted across life’s stage and vanished. Old Omar Khayâm, “King of the Wise,” in the twelfth century knew “We are no other than a moving row Of magic shadow shapes that come and go Round with the sun, illumined lantern held In midnight by the master of the show.” He had not been busied with winning knowledge without seeing the deep significance of the shadow portrait. The familiar figure of the showman whose lantern displays the black moving figures in the midnight streets of Teheran appealed to him with vital force. He uses the shadow picture constantly as a simile in his matchless quatrains—