#william bache

[hyperallergic]

Way before influencers used front or back-facing cameras to capture their likenesses, 19th-century celebrities sat for silhouettes made by a semi-automated instrument called a physiognotrace.

Selling these portraits proved to be a prosperous career for artist William Bache, who traveled up and down the United States and throughout the Caribbean from 1803 to 1812.

Now entirely digitized by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery with funding from the Getty Foundation, Bache’s silhouette album, featuring nearly 2000 profiles, has been uploaded to a microsite for researchers and photography enthusiasts to peruse. 

[dinnickhowellslikes]

[coltonwbrown]

Smithsonian on Twitter

“After William Bache traced and cut a person’s profile, he gave the hollowed-out paper to his customer and kept the head for this ledger book. The early 1800s book—in our @NPG—is a record of 1,846 men and women, across socioeconomic, racial and ethnic lines.”