Quaker silhouettes
Joanna Clark sheds light on the exhibition of Quaker silhouettes at Friends House
Portraits of early Quakers are extremely rare. One of the reasons for this was strictly practical – most Friends did not come from the social class that could afford painted portraits. However, there were also serious religious objections to images of all kinds.
Early Quakers shared with other nonconformist religious groups a rejection of the visual arts in general; while personal portraiture was seen as being expressive of personal vanity – and in Quaker parlance ‘exalting the creature’, such as emphasising the physical body rather than the spirit or light within.
By 1800 the ‘scissors art’ or cutting of silhouettes was already a popular hobby among Quakers, but it was practised at an amateur level. Among the most notable of these earlier amateurs was Thomas Pole (1759-1823), who was born in Philadelphia but practised as a physician in England; his work in silhouettes was prolific.
A generation later Samuel Metford of Glastonbury (1810-1896) became the first Quaker to practise as a professional silhouette artist. He too had learned the art when in America on business and from the 1830s to 1860s he travelled as a ‘profilist’ around Britain, often using the local Friends Meeting as his source of custom. The Library at Friends House holds quite a few of his elegant silhouette portraits, and his work is highly respected among modern collectors.
During the eighteenth century, as some Quaker families became wealthier through business success, they sometimes adopted the custom of others of the upper class and had portraits made. For example, there are portraits in oils of several members of the Gurney banking family. A greater number took up the cheaper alternative of silhouette portraits.
This increasing fashion for first silhouette profiles and later portrait photography was not without controversy. Some of the arguments can be traced through the pages of The British Friend, the journal of the evangelical wing of the Society of Friends.
Those who condemned the fashion for all portraits, however made, could quote George Fox, the founding father of Quakerism, in his savage condemnation of image-making: And to you all, friends, who are not come up to the covenant, and cannot witness that you are come into it, and sealed, (by the spirit), follow no image makers, but the life guiding you, which is eternal, that will hew down all imaginations, and likenesses, and images, and image makers, that the glorious God, the Father of life, may be exalted, the ground of all truth.
The term ‘silhouette’ derives from the name of Etienne de Silhouette, a French finance minister who, in 1759, imposed economies to deal with a credit crisis. Because of de Silhouette’s austerity measures, his name became synonymous with anything done cheaply.
Prior to the advent of photography, silhouette profiles cut from card were the cheapest way of recording a person’s appearance. In England, the form was at the height of its popularity between 1770 and 1840. It was eventually superseded by photography as the most popular medium for portraiture, but is still practiced today by enthusiasts. After 1840, these ‘shadow pictures’ had increasing competition from the new ‘light pictures’ – photographs. Photographic portraiture was expensive at first, but technical developments from the late 1850s onwards brought it within reach of the average family.
Joanna Clark, the author of this article, is the picture librarian for Friends House Library.
The exhibition of silhouettes and early photographs from their collection continues in the library until the autumn of 2011.
You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.