Background
Auguste Edouart was born on January 27, 1789, in Dunkirk commune, France.
Auguste Edouart was born on January 27, 1789, in Dunkirk commune, France.
Auguste Edouart led a porcelain manufacture in a French commune Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche from 1807 to 1809. After, he returned to Paris, where he worked as a forage inspector for troops in Antwerp during the Napoleonic Wars.
In 1814, the artist settled down with his family in London. At the begging, Edouart earned his living teaching French then creating portraits from hair or wax and making jewellery.
Approximately ten years later, the artist moved to Bath, Somerset. It was about this time when he created his first full-length profiles cut from black paper with scissors just in order to prove that he could make shadow pictures better than a machine. Edouart didn’t apply the colours to his artworks used by many other silhouette artists by the time.
At the beginning of the new decade, Auguste Edouart came to Edinburgh and produced a series of seventy-eight portraits of the exiled royal family of King Charles X. In 1935, the artist published an essay on the silhouette art called ‘A treaty on silhouette likeness’. During the three-year stint in the city, Edouart created about five hundred likenesses.
The following decade, Auguste Edouart brought the silhouette art to the United States where he spent ten years.
While the artist returned to Europe, he was involved in the shipwreck which destroyed the majority of his works. Only a few albums survived.
Auguste Edouart settled down in Guînes, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, France where he had lived till the end of his days.
William Buckland and his Wife and Son Frank, Examining Buckland's Natural History Collection
Silhouette of Fanny Brawne
H.W. Longfellow
Portrait of Abbott Lawrence family in their library, No. 5 Park Street, Boston
Portrait of Theophilus Parsons
Cut Silhouette of Two Women Facing Right
Niccolò Paganini
Jane Anderson, Esther Ainslie, Helena Anderson, Mrs. Arkley, Charles Atherton
Lucinda Carpenter, Tweeter and Abigail Forrester
Colin Gibb and Charles Gibb
The Magic Lantern
Cut Silhouette of Four Full Figures
Frank Johnson, Leader of the Brass Band of the 128th Regiment in Saratoga, with his wife, Helen