G. Atkinson (1815) also describes himself as “Silhouettist to the Royal Family.” He lived at Windsor, and there are some fine portraits of George III. and his sons, which, though stilted and without imagination, show considerable skill in the cutting. A group cut out in black and touched with gold was exhibited by G. Sharland, Esq., at the Royal Amateur Art Society’s Exhibition in 1911. Though there are many other scissor-workers who might be mentioned, and examples described of graceful women in hooped skirts and fascinating side ringlets, maidens in cottage bonnets, and dainty children whose ringing voices one can almost hear as the shadow pageant passes, yet sufficient examples have been mentioned to show how popular was the craze for black portrait cutting, and how large a branch it was of the black profile processes. That silhouettes are kept in the reference library of our National Portrait Gallery, because, on account of their life-like resemblance, they are of great value to the authorities in the identification of unknown portraits, is a fact which speaks for the great historic value of these pictorial records. In the cuttings of Edouart there is the ego of the man or woman as well as the bodily form. A gesture, the poise of the body, the arrested movement of the limbs, are shown with more than photographic correctness—when photography was as yet unborn. In the picture of a blind man we see by the tilt of the chin, the angle of the head, that, like all so afflicted, the man is exercising senses which are dormant in those who have sight. The simple black outline of the American deaf and dumb poet Nack, by this master-cutter, is instinct with the patient silence of the dumb, the aloofness of the deaf. Fine oil paintings and miniatures give us a man or woman interpreted through the senses of the artist and idealised or distorted through the alchemy of the artist’s mind. The shadow portrait is nature herself, and its very simplicity of line imposes a keener effect on the mind of the student, because there are no contours to confuse the outline. CHAPTER VI. AUGUST EDOUART AND HIS BOOK. The introduction of the name Silhouette into England seems to have been due to August Edouart, a Frenchman, who, though only commencing the black portrait cutting after leaving his own country, used the French word for his craft instead of the black shade, which had hitherto been the name in England for such profile portraits. “How many times,” writes Edouart, in the chapter in his treatise which he naïvely calls “The Grievances and Miseries of Artists,” “have I had people who, immediately after entering my room, departed, exclaiming, ‘Oh! they are all black shades,’ and would not stop to inspect them.” “The name silhouette, which appeared in the newspaper advertisements, seems to have given them to understand that it was a new kind of likeness done in colours, each of which (full-length figure) they expected to get for five shillings.”