Curators solve mysteries of ‘poisonous’ 19th-century portrait album

Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

Some two decades ago, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery acquired a 19th-century album featuring 2,000 paper portrait silhouettes, including those of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, made by the traveling artist William Bache decades before the advent of photography. But until recently, the gallery knew precious few details about the majority of those pictured.

Complicating research was an unwelcome surprise: In 2008, conservationists discovered that the album’s pages and binding were contaminated with arsenic, a toxin ubiquitous in the 1800s before it was understood to be poisonous. It could not be safely handled or shared with visitors without special precautions for hazardous materials.

But now, anyone can view a digital version of the album, titled “William Bache’s Silhouettes Album,” thanks to funding from Getty’s Paper Project initiative — and the help of hazmat suits. With the launch of the website, the National Portrait Gallery’s curatorial team has also revealed the identities of the hundreds more of those who sat for Bache. Over the past few years, they’ve matched the names Bache listed with each portrait to real people using the genealogy database Ancestry, which includes early US census reports; extensive birth, marriage, death and immigration records; and family trees dating back centuries.

In sharing the work with the wider public, the curators hope to reveal even more about Bache’s subjects, the vast majority of whom were not notable figures, but everyday people who wanted their silhouette made. With photography still decades away, silhouettes were the first opportunity for people to have pictures of themselves and loved ones at home.

“We’re hoping that, as people do their genealogy, relatives can contact us,” said Robyn Asleson, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings, in a phone interview. “And if (museum) collections have an unidentified silhouette, they may be able to identify them looking at this album.”

Digitizing the 19th century

From 1802-1813, Bache traveled from city to city up and down the US East Coast promoting his cheap and novel silhouette portraits, charging 25 cents (around five dollars today) for four identical images. He eventually set up shop in New Orleans, then traveled down to Cuba, promoting his services door to door.

“He was only in each town for a short time… he was just constantly moving,” Asleson said. Back then, artists “had to go to the people, in the way that actors at the time had to keep traveling with their shows. Once the town has seen it, they don’t want to see it again.”

To achieve his subjects’ likenesses, Bache used a physiognotrace — a semi-automatic mechanical device, whose origins date back to 18th century France, which aided artists in faithfully replicating a person’s profile on paper. The artist and two of his associates patented their own version. While some similar devices physically traced a person’s face with a small bar, Bache’s may have worked by tracing the subject’s shadow offering no-contact with a person’s face in an era of anxiety over disease.

Asleson and past curators have been able to identify many of Bache’s sitters thanks to the orderly system he kept in the album, which also served as his ledger. He kept a numbered copy of each portrait, which coincided with an index of names in the back of the album. But Bache didn’t apparently keep records intended for the eyes of future curators, and as time went on, his handwriting got sloppy.

“Toward the end … it’s very hard to read his writing,” Asleson said.

Bache didn’t always get a sitter’s name right, sometimes opting for phonetic spellings, she added. And, in Cuba, he abandoned numbering and naming altogether, leaving hundreds of portraits without any identifiable information.

“He was just going door to door to as many people as possible,” she said. “And I think it was just a different system — he wasn’t in a shop where people could come in at random.”

Asleson says it’s unclear why the album’s pages and binding are contaminated with arsenic, but noted that it was “part of daily life” at the time. The gallery only discovered its presence when a curator working with the album wanted to test residue visible against the black paper. (Arsenic toxicity typically results from ingestion, not through the skin, but was still deemed hazardous by Smithsonian.)

“It’s just a fluke that they happen to do this testing, which raises the question that maybe a lot of things are contaminated and we don’t know,” she said.

Visitors to the digital album can look at each individual portrait and read what information is available on its subject. The project launched in March, and Asleson said it’s just the beginning of digitizing efforts across Smithsonian’s institutions.

“We are custodians, but we’re also exhibition institutions and we want to share with the public what we have in our collection. Digitizing them is the best way,” she said. “There’s a push across Smithsonian to get as much as we can out the world so we can share what we have and learn more about it.”

“William Bache’s Silhouettes Album” can be viewed here.

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