More than two decades ago, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery acquired a 19th-century album of nearly 2,000 silhouette portraits, including those of two former presidents.
Before the paper-cut portraits created by a traveling artist named William Bache could go on display, the museum had to make a new, sturdier binding for the book. It was then that the curators noticed an unusual red residue on the pages and decided to test the book to make sure it was safe to handle. They found that each of the album’s fragile pages was laced with arsenic.
The album sat in a box until early this year when curators used a grant from the Getty Foundation to digitize it. The museum put the collection online last month, allowing anyone to virtually browse the images and learn more about Bache’s life and work through an interactive timeline.
Robyn Asleson, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings, said researchers had identified just over 1,000 of the 1,800 portraits. By digitizing the album and making it available online, she said, she hopes it will eventually be possible to identify every portrait in the collection.
“We realized that this book represented a lot of people who left no other portrait,” said Dr. Asleson. “And so it’s a really interesting way to look at early 19th century American history and just sort of a cross-section of society.”
The invention of photography was still a few years away and painting a portrait was time consuming and expensive. Silhouettes were a cheaper, more accessible form of portraiture.
The 1,800 portraits represent a wide variety of people, including such prominent figures as Thomas Jefferson and George and Martha Washington, as well as enslaved and formerly enslaved people, said Anne Verplanck, a retired associate professor of American studies at Penn State University, Harrisburg. , and a researcher of portraiture.
“There is rarely a complete or large list of who they portrayed,” said Dr. Verplanck. “This gives us an unusual detail of life back then.”
Bache, who emigrated to Philadelphia from England in May 1793, was like a “traveling salesman, but for silhouettes,” said Dr. Asleson.
He traveled up the east coast from Maine to Virginia, selling portraits for money. He eventually settled in New Orleans, where he produced nearly 700 portraits of people of various origins, including French, Spanish, German, British, and Caribbean. He then traveled to Cuba, where he went door to door offering his services. Despite having no formal training as an artist, Bache had a solid clientele and kept his prices low by offering four profiles for 25 cents, or the equivalent of about $5 today.
Dr. Asleson said Bache used a physiognot race, a mechanical device he modified and patented in 1803, which could trace the contours of a human face with “mathematical correctness” without coming into contact with it. After completing a portrait, Bache added additional details, such as curly locks of hair, to make it even more accurate.
Bache assigned a number to most customers. He would quickly draw their silhouette and, after giving them their copies, save the leftover cutout and paste it into the album, creating a “yearbook” of his work, said Dr. Asleson. In the back of the book he kept a ledger in which he noted each number and its name.
Dr. Asleson said Bache had begun by neatly rendering each name, but his writing became sloppier over time. Many of the names were written phonetically, she said, often resulting in misspellings.
After receiving the grant from the Getty Foundation, the museum worked for two weeks with a photographer from the Smithsonian, a paper curator, and a few other people to create high-resolution images of the portraits. Because of the arsenic, Dr. Asleson that each person should wear a face mask, gloves and protective coat, and that a scientist was on hand to monitor toxin levels to make sure it was safe.
It’s unclear how the arsenic got onto the pages of books, but it was considered safe in small doses in the 19th century and was commonly found in food, medicine, and even common goods like face powder. In Britain at the time, an arsenic-based green pigment was used in wallpaper.
Heather MacDonald, a senior program officer at the Getty Foundation, said the project was a perfect fit for the Paper Project initiative.
“It’s symbolic of what we’re trying to do: support curators who want to use parts of museum collections that are tucked away and give them visibility, and really create frameworks that let people understand its relevance,” she said.
Dr. Asleson and a research assistant, Elizabeth Isaacson, scanned Ancestry.com and dug into digitized newspapers, history books, baptismal records, wills and marriage records to identify people whose silhouettes appear in the book. They identified even more after Dr. Asleson had expanded her research to include Spanish-language material and discovered that Bache had worked in Cuba.
About half of the people whose portraits are included in the book were identified after the gallery was released online. Dr. Asleson said she heard from a New Orleans historian who helped the curators identify some of the silhouettes — just what the researchers had hoped would happen.
Ideally, said Dr. Asleson, could someone still have a silhouette portrait passed down through the generations that could be linked to one of the images in the book. Another hope, she said, is that as more people trace their family’s history through genetic genealogy, more of Bache’s subjects can be identified.
“We just realized that it’s going to be really interesting for people who are descendants or have relatives represented in this album, who don’t have a different view of a great-great-grandfather, great-great-grandmother,” said Dr. Asleson. “I would think this would be really exciting and valuable to them.”