Silhouettes

Figures and objects reduced to a flat, dark outline, from cut-paper profile portraits to silhouette animation and contemporary art.

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About

A silhouette reduces a person or object to a flat, dark shape that still manages to be recognisable. Before photography, cut or painted profiles offered a quick likeness within reach of ordinary households, and in the 1770s the Swiss writer Johann Caspar Lavater used them to read character from the outline of the face. Specialists such as Augustin Edouart, a Frenchman working in Britain and the United States from the 1820s to the 1840s, cut thousands of full-length figures freehand with scissors. The name comes from Étienne de Silhouette, a French finance minister of the late 1750s.

The form moved into film and contemporary art. Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), animated with hinged paper cut-outs, is the oldest surviving feature-length animated film. Kara Walker has used black paper silhouettes since the 1990s, staging scenes of slavery at panoramic scale in a genteel 19th-century craft.