SILHOUETTES

I was recently clearing out some very old art magazines and came across an article on Etienne De Silhouette - it had never occurred to me that silhouettes were named after a person. Even though it is obviously a french sounding word I would associate silhouettes more so with our journeys to Germany where the craft is very big (and very intricate) especially in the Black Forest area. But these wall stickery things have been very big in France for some time, usually pretty awful looking, but I do like the family tree idea below.

Back to Etienne; he was born in Limoges in 1709, worked as a translator in England, then Controller of Finance in France and all the while he was doodling away which developed into cutting out paper portraits and inking them in. He hadn't invented the technique, their origin is lost in time, indeed some cave paintings are silhouette in style and then you have the shadow puppets of the far east. Silhouettes became all the rage and the must have home fashion accessory in the mid to late 1700's, a guy called John Miers was the top producer and elevated the skill to a fine art. So even after reading the article I am still none the wiser why the style was named after Monsieur Silhouette, he had managed somehow to bring them into mass popularity but as the Controller of Finance I don't know quite how.

Aha! wikipedia has not failed me! It is because Controller Silhouette was known for his penny pinching and tough financial laws, he was a cheapskate and as it was the people of lowly income that bought the cut out pictures as they could not afford proper portraits of their loved ones, the cheap pics were called silhouettes after him. There you go, you learn something new every day.