Long before influencers used front or back cameras to capture their likeness, 19th century celebrities sat down for silhouettes made by a semi-automated instrument called a physiognotrace. The devices produced inexpensive, exact replicas of a person much faster than an artist could create a painting or sculpture. Selling these portraits proved to be a lucrative career for artist William Bache, who traveled the United States and the Caribbean from 1803 to 1812. Now fully digitized thanks to a partnership between the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and the Getty Institute, Bache’s silhouette album, containing nearly 2000 profiles, was uploaded to a microsite for researchers and photography enthusiasts to browse.
Although the National Portrait Gallery featured the book in the 2018 exhibition Black Out: silhouettes of yesterday and today, historians and researchers had no access to the portraits in the album due to the dangers of exposure to the arsenic present in the pages of the volume. The newly launched platform contains high-resolution images of Bache’s profiles, biography and timeline, curatorial reports and other digital materials. Curator of Prints and Drawings Robyn Asleson has also confirmed the identities of hundreds of sitters Bache depicted.
“Someone can come up with the image of a great-great-grandparent or other ancestor they’ve never seen a likeness to before,” Asleson said. Hyperallergic.
Users can browse portraits, zoom in on specific individual profiles, and find names, life dates, and other site information. The album features the likenesses of notable figures like Thomas Jefferson, Martha Washington, and former Secretary of State Edmund Randolph, as well as comedians, actors, and everyday people, including people of African descent. Asleson’s team was surprised to discover that Bache had traveled as far as the Caribbean, potentially Cuba. The new information may shed light on social environments in New Orleans or transatlantic relations between Louisiana and Cuba.
Primary documents showing Bache’s business and marketing tactics are also available and reveal the ingenuity of an artist who earned his living before a definite art industry emerged in the United States. Bache patented his new device and method of portraiture at the turn of the 19th century with his partners Isaac Todd and Augustus Day. Unlike its competitor’s device, Bache’s physiognotrace produces silhouettes without touching the face, a distinctive feature. Therefore, the device did not spread infectious diseases such as smallpox, typhoid and measles.
Physiotracing was popular until the invention of the photographic camera in 1816 because it democratized portraiture and could create scientifically accurate images. Asleson notes that some researchers used silhouettes to bolster the racist pseudoscience of physiognomy, which sought to link a person’s physical characteristics (such as face color, nose shape, or hair texture) to ability. emotional or intellectual – a theory that 19th century scientists used to justify white racial superiority.
Yet, mainly because the profiles were so inexpensive – newspaper advertisements digitized on the microsite show four portraits costing 25 cents (about $5 today) – more individuals and families of different classes could afford to buy these pictures as keepsakes to remember family members. and relatives.
“The portraits in this album provide images of a much wider cross-section of society, and we were thrilled to share them with the public,” Asleson said.
