55th Annual Delaware Show

As enthusiasm for the portrait silhouette grew, all classes of society avidly collected them, organized them into albums, exchanged them with friends and family, and even tried creating their own. Two albums of silhouettes in the Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera at Winterthur were compiled by Philadelphian Joseph Sansom between 1790 and 1800. Given the title An Occasional Collection of Physiognomical Sketches, chiefly North American, and drawn from the life; designed to preserve the characteristic features of personally, mentally, or officially Remarkable Persons, and the endeared memory of Private Friends or Public Benefactors with professional Notices, &c. , one volume contains fifty-eight silhouette profiles of people in the Philadelphia area, including Benjamin Franklin and James Madison as well as a Native American, Tsekuyeaathaw of the Senecas (fig. 7). Fig. 7. Native American from the Joseph Sansom silhouette album, 1790−1800. Winterthur Library Doc. 52 The Coates family of Philadelphia created a collection of silhouettes as well, in the early nineteenth century. The grouping includes more than seventy named portraits, many of which bear the emblem of the Peale Museum. A leading attraction of Charles Willson Peale’s Philadelphia museum was an instrument called the physiognotrace. Using a small bar connected to a pantograph to trace around the sitter’s face, the physiognotrace was capable of creating a silhouette in a miniature — 31 —