Before photography, one of the most popular forms of portraiture was the silhouette. Quick to make and affordable to produce, the cut-paper works were prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The form is considered enigmatic as it simultaneously reveals some of aspects of a subject’s appearance, while obscuring others.
Silhouette of Edgar Allan Poe
This semester, students in the course African Americans and Art have been captivated by the silhouette artist Moses Williams (1777-c. As art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw explores in her 2005 article for the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Williams’s work has only recently gotten much attention. Williams’s work is featured in Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.
Silhouette Artist: Lauren Muney (Interview)
The Early Life and Training of Moses Williams
Williams was born into slavery in 1777, and grew up in the household of Charles Willson Peale. All of Peale’s children learned an art; in fact he named his sons after famed artists Rembrandt, Raphaelle, Titian, and Rubens. Williams was also taught an art, but while Peale’s sons studied painting, Williams had only the physiognotrace, a silhouette-making machine used to trace a reduced outline of the sitter. At Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, Williams operated the physiognotrace, a portable device used to create a reduced size profile of a sitter. The profile was then placed over a darker color of paper. After finishing the tracing, Williams cut the profile from the white sheet of paper and discarded it.
Moses Williams: The Artist and His Success
Williams was freed in 1802 at the age of 27, and set up shop within Peale’s Museum. Yet that did not stop him from success. As the historian Paul R. Cutright notes, in his first year working at the museum, Williams produced more than 8,000 silhouettes for eight cents each. He married Maria, a white woman who had worked as the Peales’ cook, and bought a two-story house. The precision in Williams’s portraits was impressive, especially since he created them on such a mass scale. Each was just stamped “Museum,” so his attribution as an artist was obscured.
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Physiognotrace
Unveiling Identity and Agency in Williams's Work
Shaw highlights an 1803 silhouette portrait labeled “Moses Williams, Cutter of Profiles.” While it was in the collections of the Library Company of Philadelphia since the 1850s, only in 1996 was it given critical attention and attributed to Raphaelle Peale, but Shaw theorizes it may be a self-portrait, revealing both Williams’s empowerment as an artist and lack of agency as a formerly enslaved man of mixed heritage, particularly through the hand-cut alterations to the machine-traced lines that extended the hair and smoothed its curl.
“By deviating from the original form line, I believe that Moses Williams purposely created an image in which his own features would connote tropes of whiteness rather than blackness,” Shaw writes. “But was it an attempt to deny the African part of his racial heritage?
| Artist | Artwork | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Kara Walker | Panoramic silhouettes of plantation life and African American history | Contemporary |
| Kristi Malakoff | Life-size sculptures depicting a children’s Maypole dance | Contemporary |
| Camille Utterback | Interactive digital work that reacts to visitors' shadows and movements | Contemporary |
| Kumi Yamashita | Mixed-media profiles of people who are not there, using light and shadow | Contemporary |
Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now
Silhouettes-cut paper profiles-were a hugely popular and democratic form of portraiture in the 19th century, offering virtually instantaneous likenesses of everyone from presidents to those who were enslaved. The exhibition “Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now” explores this relatively unstudied art form by examining its rich historical roots and considering its forceful contemporary presence. Highlights of the historical objects include a double-silhouette portrait of a same-sex couple and a rarely seen life-size silhouette of a nineteen-year-old enslaved girl, along with the bill of her sale from 1796.
The featured contemporary artists are Kara Walker, who makes panoramic silhouettes of plantation life and African American history; Canadian artist Kristi Malakoff, who cuts paper to make life-size sculptures depicting a children’s Maypole dance; MacArthur-prize-winner Camille Utterback, who will present an interactive digital work that reacts to visitors’ shadows and movements; and Kumi Yamashita, who “sculpts” light and shadow with objects to create mixed-media profiles of people who are not there.
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