William Bache's Silhouettes Album via The National Portrait Gallery

[Shared]William Bache (1771–1845) emigrated from England to Philadelphia in May 1793 with no apparent training as an artist. Yet from 1803 to 1812, he pursued a prolific and successful career as an itinerant maker of silhouette portraits, traveling up and down the eastern seaboard, from Maine to Virginia, and further south to Louisiana and Cuba. Working sporadically over that nine-year period, he produced thousands of shaded profiles with the aid of a patented physiognotrace, a mechanical device used to trace the outline of a person’s face. Cheap and quick to make, silhouettes captured the likenesses of a broad cross-section of society, including those who could afford no other form of portrait.

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