Founding Friendships by Cassandra A. Good

Author:Cassandra A. Good [Cassandra A. Good]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-11-19T20:20:00+00:00

FIGURE 6.11 This Vanderlyn nude may have been the artistic inspiration for Goodridge’s Beauty Revealed. Note the similarity in the shape, size, coloration, and surrounding of white gauzy cloth. John Vanderlyn, Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, 1809–14, oil on canvas, 1878.1.11. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr. Collection).

Other Representations

There is one final genre of visual representation that was cheaper, easier to acquire, and more widespread than oil portraits or miniatures: the silhouette. The opacity of these outlined forms mirrors the difficulty in finding and analyzing traces of them. The exchange of silhouettes was rarely mentioned in letters and diaries, and they were much less likely to be preserved than costly works on canvas or ivory. Residents of Philadelphia and Baltimore could have silhouettes done at the Peale Museums in either city, and by folding the black paper over twice, the sitter could get four copies of his or her profile. Elsewhere itinerant silhouette makers or even prominent silhouette artists like Saint Memin could create the images in multiple copies. These could then be given to friends, family, or acquaintances in the community.43

Peale advertised his machine for creating silhouettes, the physiognotrace, as a tool for creating gifts for friends because “friendship esteems as valuable even the most distant likeness of a friend.” Within “less than a minute,” museum visitors could get “the truest outlines of any heretofore invented” to keep for themselves and give as gifts.44 Ann Ridgely, a Delaware woman visiting Philadelphia, probably had her silhouette done at the Peale Museum there, as had her circle of friends. She wrote her mother in 1803 to report that “I had my profile taken, ‘tis the image of me, consequently too ugly to shew. All my friends here want one, but I will not leave one behind.” She had received profiles from “a number of my acquaintance,” which she lists as including both men and women. While an accurate representation of the outlines of a face, the lack of detail and the cheapness of these images made them appropriate gifts between male/female friends.

One of the rare surviving examples of a silhouette relating to a friendship is that of Mary Roberdeau in the collection of John Quincy Adams (Figure 6.12). Adams recorded in his diary on March 4, 1829, that silhouette maker Jarvis Hanks came to his home and “cut me out and all the family in paper.”45 Included in this family group of silhouettes, all mounted on one page and labeled in Adams’s hand, is one of his friend Mary Roberdeau. Mary must have been at the Adams’ home frequently, as John Quincy Adams recorded in a poem to her around this time that “many a pleasing day/Cheer’d by thy conversation I have past.”46 Her inclusion with the carefully lined-up silhouettes of Adams family members depicted her as both a friend of the family rather than just Adams, as well as showing the intimacy of that friendship. By agreeing

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