Augustin Amant Constant Fidèle Edouart

After the death of his mother, Augustin Édouart began working at age fifteen to support his father, paralyzed during the French Revolution, and his many siblings. Within four years Édouart was director of a China manufactory, and two years later he was commissioned Inspecteur des Fourrages in Holland. He travelled to Germany to produce table services for Napoleon and joined the Grand Army on its way to Russia. Devoted to the revolution and Napoleon, at the restoration of the monarchy in 1814, Édouart became an expatriate in London. There he exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, taught French, and practiced the art of hairwork, modeling portraits in wax with real hair. After the death of his wife in 1825, he became a silhouettist, a profession much in demand before the age of photography.

Traveling in Scotland, Ireland, and Wales over the next fourteen years, Édouart claimed to have cut fifty thousand silhouettes. His success was due in part to his talent with scissors; he cut his silhouettes by hand rather than with the common mechanical aid of a physiognotrace. He was widely hailed and patronized by the nobility of Europe. After publishing A Treatise on Silhouette Likenesses, Édouart embarked on an extended ten-year visit to the United States in 1839.

Thanks to the newspaper ads he published in various cities to announce his arrivals and departures, it is possible trace his American travels as he made his way through population centers and vacation destinations. After only five years in the U.S., he advertised in the New Orleans Daily Picayune that he was exhibiting his extensive collection of 150,000 American likenesses. Such a show was possible because Édouart always made at least two copies of a silhouette—one for the client and one for his archive, retaining the duplicate as a photographer would retain a negative.

In 1849, he packed his folios for his return voyage to France. Nearing the European coast off Germany, however, the ship was wrecked. The crew and passengers were saved, as were some of Édouart’s books, folios, and papers, but the experience was nevertheless personally devastating to the artist. He gave his rescued materials away, and there is no evidence that he ever resumed his career as a silhouettist. To date, twenty-one of the albums have been recovered, although two were lost in World War I.