Silhouetteur
Silhouetteur (French silhouettiste ) is a former profession.
Silhouettes made drawings of the shadows of objects, mostly of individual people and as a half-length portrait, more rarely of several people or of a whole figure. A pantograph called a “cork's beak” was used to scale the representation down . The silhouettes (cf. the word outline ) were then cut out of black paper with scissors, which is where the less precise job title “silhouette cutter” comes from, or they were painted in with ink. In order to reproduce them, they were also engraved in copper. Genre scenes as well as plants and animals were further motifs of this "black art".
Said to have originated in the Orient in the 18th century, the silhouette was picked up in France. It is named after Étienne de Silhouette , Finance Minister Louis XV. and hobby shearers. Its austerity measures are said to have favored the cheap shadow image instead of the expensive portrait painting. Until the spread of photography , the silhouetteurs were also at work in large numbers in the German-speaking area, and their miniatures adorned living rooms, albums, family books, medallions, glasses, etc.
“In almost every house of distinction you can only see black pictures, but they are drawn with so much accuracy that one would only have to have an ex- lavatory and extremely stupid physiognomist's face if he did not at least take the main traces of the characteristics AJ von Aichenstein ( pseudonym ) in his book Description of the Silhouette Factory in Vienna , published in 1782 .
Web links
literature
- Rudi Palla: The lexicon of the lost professions . Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-8289-4152-4 .