Auguste Edouart Explained

Auguste Amant Constant Fidèle Edouart (1789–1861) was a French-born portrait artist who worked in England, Scotland and the United States in the 19th century. He specialised in silhouette portraits.

Biography

Born in Dunkerque, he left France in 1814, and established himself in London, where he began his career making portraits from hair. In 1825, he began work as a silhouette portraitist, taking full-length likenesses in profile by cutting out black paper with scissors. Edouart spent fifteen years touring England and in 1829 arrived in Edinburgh. He remained there for three years, during which time he produced some 5,000 likenesses.[1] Edouart travelled in the United States in about 1839–49, visiting New York, Boston and other locales.

He later returned to France, where he worked on smaller silhouettes. They included one of the most notable writers of this period, Victor Hugo.[2] [3] [4]

Portraits

Edouart created portraits of hundreds of subjects, including:

Collections

Works by Edouart reside in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London; National Galleries of Scotland; Crawford Art Gallery, Cork; New York Historical Society;[15] Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Historic New England; and the American Jewish Historical Society, New York.

Exhibitions

The Art of the Silhouette in 19th-century Cork, which included works by Edouart, Stephen O’Driscoll (c.1825-1895), and miniature portraits of members of the Crawford Family, was held at Crawford Art Gallery, Cork in 2015.

"Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now", which included works by Edouart, Moses Williams, and others, held at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C. May 31, 2018 to March 10, 2019, and the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham AL, September 28, 2019 to January 12, 2020.

Further reading

External links

Notes and References

  1. http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?LinkID=mp06932&role=art National Portrait Gallery, London
  2. Victor Hugo in Guernsey; Canadian Art Publications; Date: January 26, 2011
  3. Ethel Stanwood Bolton. Wax portraits and silhouettes. Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1915. Google books
  4. New York Herald
    Date: November 23, 1844
  5. http://www.historicnewengland.org/collections-archives-exhibitions/collections-access Historic New England
  6. http://www.mfa.org/collections Museum of Fine Arts Boston collections
  7. "Connell, John, David, Arthur and Mrs. Approx. 5 ½" x 8" cut by August Edouart in Glasgow, June 10, 1832. Reproduced for the Boston Evening Transcript. Sat. Nov. 4, 1939." American Antiquarian Society . Retrieved 2010-09-05
  8. http://www.nationalgalleries.org/collection/online_az/4:322/?initial=E&artistId=3227&artistName=Augustin%20Edouart&submit=1 National Galleries Scotland
  9. Nevill Jackson . Some men of letters in silhouette . The Bookman . Jan 1912 .
  10. https://www.flickr.com/photos/piedmont_fossil/506282921/ Flickr
  11. Web site: Josiah Harlan National Portrait Gallery . 2022-12-15 . npg.si.edu.
  12. Mack and Mack. Like a sponge thrown into water: Francis Lieber's European travel journal of 1844-1845. University of South Carolina Press, 2002
  13. http://collections.si.edu/search/results.jsp?q=record_ID:npg_NPG.91.126.35.B Smithsonian
  14. Web site: Samuel Jarvis Peters. 2021-05-06. npg.si.edu. en.
  15. http://emuseum.nyhistory.org/code/emuseum.asp NY Historical Society

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