AUGUST EDOUART: Silhouette art

Born 1789, died I861;   A Frenchman, served under Napoleon, and was decorated. He married Mademoiselle Vital, and during the political crisis came to England. Cut silhouettes in doubled black paper; itinerated in the large towns in England and on the Continent. He kept books of duplicates which contained upwards of 100,000 portraits; these included the French Royal Family taken at Holyrood, hundreds of the gentry and nobility of Great Britain, besides professional men, statesmen, politicians, and almost every man and women of note of his time. He wrote a treatise on silhouettes, a demy octavo volume with many illustrations, which is now very rare. When upwards of fifty years of age, Edouart went to America, and while their he cut the portraits of presidents, soldiers, sailors, senators, and famous man and women in the States. In 1849 the ship " Oneida," on which the artist returned, was wrecked, and many of his valuable volumes of duplicates were lost, some 9,000 portraits. However fourteen volumes were saved and form a remarkable collection of the celebrities of his day.

The Cary Family, of Boston, 1842

Samuel Foote, New York, 1839 

Self portrait EdouartNathan Mayer Rothschild 
 

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