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Portrait Silhouette of a Man
19th Century

$8,500

£6,446.91

€7,721.77

CA$12,239.14

A$12,522.39

CHF 7,103.10

MX$160,510.82

NOK 81,457.98

SEK 84,905.43

DKK 57,720.88

About the Item

Attributed to Moses Williams (American, 1775 – 1825) Portrait Silhouette of a Man Hollow-cut silhouette on paper 4 x 3 inches (10.2 x 7.6 cm) Provenance: Private Collection, Janet and Charles Muto, Ottawa Hills, Ohio, until 2025. Humble in scale, subtly detailed, and expertly cut, the silhouettes produced by Moses Williams rank among the most intriguing 19th-century American examples of this craft. Moses was one of the earliest artists of African descent to establish a professional career in the United States. He was born into slavery, the son of an enslaved couple, Scarborough and Lucy, who entered the household of the noted painter Charles Willson Peale in Maryland around 1775, possibly as payment for a portrait commission. Peale later moved his household to Philadelphia and emancipated the couple in 1786 through the Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act, a recently enacted Pennsylvania law that he had advocated for, requiring the freeing of enslaved people over the age of 28. Moses, then only 11 years old, remained in Peale’s service and grew up in the artist’s household amongst his many children—all of whom were trained as painters. Moses Williams worked in Peale’s famous Philadelphia Museum, which consisted of a menagerie of painted portraits, natural history specimens, fossils, ethnographic artifacts, live animals, and more (Fig. 1). By 1802 Peale’s Philadelphia Museum was located in Pennsylvania’s State House, where the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were created. Although he was engaged in various tasks and object display, Moses’s main responsibility at the museum was operating the physiognotrace (Fig. 2)—a newly invented machine that traced a person’s profile, transferring and reducing the outline onto a small piece of paper. From the impression made by the machine, Moses would hand-cut the silhouettes, creating the profiles by removing the middle of the paper and placing the sheet against a dark background. The physiognotrace and Moses’ silhouettes quickly became among the chief attractions of the Peale Museum, as the demand for portraits and desire to capture, memorialize, and share one’s likeness increasingly became part of early American visual culture. In the first full year that the physiognotrace was introduced at the museum, about 80% of the visitors (roughly 8,000 people) had their profiles made by Moses Williams at a cost of eight cents each. The characteristic “MUSEUM” stamp appears on all silhouettes produced at Peale’s Philadelphia Museum, and Moses Williams’ body of work is likely entirely contained within this group. Several other hands worked at the museum in different periods, including Peale himself, but in the period in which he was active (1802 until approximately 1813), Moses was chiefly responsible for the silhouettes made at the museum. His immediate success with cutting silhouettes was such that Charles Willson Peale freed him in 1802 at the age of twenty-seven—a year earlier than required by the Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act. Peale’s son Rembrandt later recorded the circumstances of Moses’s early freedom and newfound success: “It is a curious fact that until the age of 27, Moses was entirely worthless: but on the invention of the Physiognotrace, he took a fancy to amuse himself in cutting out the rejected profiles made by the machine, and soon acquired such dexterity and accuracy, that the machine was confided to his custody with the privilege of retaining the fee for drawing and cutting. This soon became so profitable, that my father insisted upon giving him his freedom one-year in advance. In a few years he amassed a fund sufficient to buy a two story brick house, and actually married my father’s white cook, who during his bondage, would not permit him to eat at the same table with her.” While this and other writings by Rembrandt, who was roughly a year younger than Moses and grew up alongside him in the Peale household, reveal a slight disdain for Moses, Charles Willson Peale’s brief and scattered mentions of him are always glowing and speak to the high-quality of Moses’s silhouette cutting. In one particularly intriguing case, Peale mentions encountering a southern man who asked that Peale make a silhouette of him, but he rebuffed him: “Moses has made him a good one, [but] being from Carolina he did not at first relish having it done by a Molatta, however I convinced him that Moses could do it much better than I could.” Two images of Moses Williams himself are known—one a silhouette and possible self-portrait (Fig. 3) and the other a painting by Rembrandt Peale, in which Moses is thought to have served as the model (Fig. 4). Moses Williams’ significance and the scope of his production at the Peale Museum has until recently been overlooked—a circumstance all too common for historic artists of color. And the ephemeral and personal nature of paper silhouettes has resulted in most not having survived. The silhouette presented here, bearing the Philadelphia Peale Museum’s characteristic “MUSEUM” blind stamp, has been attributed to Moses Williams on the basis of style and technique. Williams was especially known for his ability to capture fine details like the falling of a single lock of hair or the slender fabric of a necktie, as seen in the example presented here. His silhouettes often also exhibit pentimenti—deviations in the cut profile from the physiognotrace’s thin embossed lines on the paper. A significant group of silhouettes given to Moses Williams is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We are grateful to Dr. Anne Verplanck for her assistance in cataloguing this work.

Attributed to:
Moses Williams (1777 - 1825, American)
Creation Year:
19th Century
Dimensions:
Height: 4 in (10.16 cm)Width: 3 in (7.62 cm)
Medium:
Paper
Period:
19th Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
New York, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU10218086462

Materials

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Portrait Silhouette of a Man
19th Century