The Itinerant Artist: Portraiting Early America Using Scissors, Soot and Beer

Hundreds of thousands of profile portraits known as silhouettes were created in the new United States in the first decade of 1800 alone. Since the 1990s, museum conservators have wondered how to best care for the materials of these objects in their collection, and a key to understanding conservation is to understand the original fabrication. Volumes of histories have been written of the art and artists, but few analyses and no published experimental studies about the materials themselves have been produced.