From New York Hubard was taken to Boston, and thence to Philadelphia, where he exhibited silhouettes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1826, 1827, and 1828-a pretty good evidence of their merit. Dunlap, the censorious, says: "He was brought to this country a boy by some persons who made money by his ingenuity as cutter of profiles in paper, at which he was uncommonly clever." While in Boston Hubard was emulated to higher walks in art by a sight of the works of Stuart, and in Philadelphia, under Sully's guidance, essayed oil-painting, exhibiting a portrait at the Academy in 1829. From this time on Hubard ceased his early vocation, and became known as an adept painter of small whole-length portraits in cabinet size. He migrated to Baltimore and thence to Richmond, where he died February 15, 1862, from the explosion of a shell he was filling with a compound he had concocted for the use of the Confederacy. But few of his silhouettes are known, although many doubtless exist unidentified as of his authorship.

We do not know if Hubard's success in England led Edouart, who was born in France in 1788 and found refuge in London in 1815, to take to silhouette-cutting as a pro

Rev. Augustin Gaspard Edouart, of Nyanza Villa, Grange Park, Ealing, England. Some idea can be formed of Edouart's success and the prevalence of the mania for these black profiles from the fact that in the ten years preceding the publication of his book Edouart cut more than fifty thousand portraits.

In 1838 he came to the United States, where he remained nine years, cutting innumerable silhouette likenesses, some of which he grouped into compositions of domestic life, with elaborate lithograph backgrounds. He preserved a duplicate of every portrait he took, which he pasted into large books, writing the necessary information for identification and reference. These books would be invaluable to-day, containing portraits of " numerous somebodies among innumerable nobodies," but, unfortunately, only a few damaged volumes, from about fifty perfect ones, survive. On Edouart's return voyage from America, in 1847, he was shipwrecked off the island of Guernsey, and his entire collection went to the bottom of the sea, only a few volumes being recovered, and those badly injured by the salt water. The loss so preyed upon his mind that he gave up cutting silhouettes, returned to his native

gration to this country that Edouart began his career. In 1835 he published a modest volume entitled "A Treatise on Silhouette Likenesses by Monsieur Edouart, Silhouettist to the French Royal Family, and patronised by His Royal Highness the late Duke of Gloucester, and the principal Nobility of England, Scotland, and Ireland." This book I have not been able to find in any public collection, and the only copy I know is owned by the author's son, the

Guinnes, near Calais, December 14, 1861. He was surely a man of great ability in his line, putting the characteristics of the individual into his likenesses, which quality is the ruling one in the work of the last of the silhouettists, William Henry Brown.

In the summer of 1874 the writer sought rest on the tableland of the ridge of mountains where is now built the flourishing town of Kane, Pennsylvania. The air was delightful, the trout streams attractive, the deer-licks not dangerous, and

also very clever at cutting ships under sail, cleaving the billows or becalmed, tossed on the stormy wave-crests or riding securely at anchor. In these designs the delineation of the varied motions was executed with uncommon skill.

Brown possessed in a noted degree the gift of memory, and was a fluent and agreeable talker: indeed, he was such a charming conversationalist that he was admitted into close companionship with the prominent men of his day, most of whom were cut by him; and his reminiscences were highly entertaining. Brown's most remarkable trait, not known to have been possessed by any other follower of the art of silhouette-cutting, was his marvelous faculty of memorizing forms and faces, so that a single glance of the eye, a veritable snap-shot, was sufficient to pho

tograph upon his brain any object presented to him. He was thus enabled not only to cut silhouette likenesses unknown to the subject and without a "sitting," but to repeat and reproduce them years afterward with absolute accuracy.

For several years Brown carried on a lucrative business in the practice of his interesting profession, and during that time visited all the principal cities of the Union. His first object on visiting a new place was to notice prominent and wellknown citizens as they walked upon the streets, and from his mental photograph to reproduce their likenesses in black paper, which would be exhibited to the surprise and wonderment of the subjects. and their friends. Success was sure to attend such exhibitions, and Brown accumulated money easily and rapidly, and

Henry Clay wrote to Brown: "It is the very perfection of your art." And Calhoun says: "I take pleasure in bearing testimony to your great aptitude in taking likenesses in your way, and the fidelity with which they are executed." The results indorsed by these three great leaders were gained with no other contrivance than a pair of small scissors and a piece of black paper; for while Brown was so facile with this housewife's implement, he had no command of the pencil or the brush.

The common introduction of the camera put an end to the silhouettists' occupation, and in 1859 Brown gave up this pursuit and entered into the employ of the Hunt

ANDREW JACKSON

Taken in Washington in 1829.

spent it in the same way, so that he was often penniless. He was gifted but improvident qualities that seem to be not seldom complementary to each other.

It was Brown's rare power in catching the individual characteristic of his subject that made his likenesses "recognizable at a glance," as Daniel Webster wrote to him, adding, "My friends unite in saying that the one you took of myself is a striking likeness. I cannot, however, see its resemblance to the original, as I do in all the others. It is an old and very true saying that if we could see ourselves as others see us,' etc." Concerning the likeness of his old antagonist, John Randolph,

GENERAL WINFIELD SCOTT

ington and Broad Top Railroad, in Pennsylvania. While in this position his attention was called to a reproduction of his cutting of many years before entitled "The First Steam Train of Cars in America;" and he at once went to work to gather material to refute the commonly accepted dogma that the first locomotive and train of cars were of home manufacture and run in New York on the Mohawk and Hudson Railway, August 9, 1831. This resulted in his "History of the First Locomotives in America," which was published by Appleton in 1874, and in which Brown shows that the first locomotive in America was the " Stourbridge Lion," imported from England by the Delaware and Hudson Canal, and put upon its road at Honesdale, August 8, 1829; and that the "Best Friend was the first locomo

tive built in this country, at Kemble's West Point foundry, for the South Carolina Railroad, and first used there January 15, 1831.

This important book was Brown's second literary venture, for in 1844 he published at Hartford, with lithographs by Kellogg, "Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Men," nearly the entire edition of which was destroyed by fire, so that copies are rarely to be met with. It consisted of reproductions of his silhouettes and facsimile letters from the subjects, certifying to their satisfaction with their own and their neighbors' likenesses.

In the revolution of time and fashion, black profile likenesses à la silhouette are again coming to the fore; only now their old enemy, the camera, is doing the work of the scissors.