An album of silhouettes by the artist William Bache could not be easily studied because it was contaminated with arsenic. Now, curators are revealing its contents.
," 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.
Bache kept a copy of each portrait and a ledger of names, but little information was known about his subjects until now."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 collections have an unidentified silhouette, they may be able to identify them looking at this album.
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.
"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.
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