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.
Bache preserved nearly two thousand of his earliest silhouettes in a ledger book that was acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2002. Conservation analysis in 2008 revealed that the album was infused with arsenic, a hazardous material. This interactive, digital reproduction of the ledger book provides a safe means of accessing Bache's work, and supporting materials provide additional insights into his life and practice.
View William Bache's
Silhouettes Album