The William Bache Silhouettes Album is a 19th-century collection of 2,000 paper portrait silhouettes which was acquired by the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in the early 2000s.
The album features the portraits of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, among others, and was created by the travelling artist William Bache before the advent of photography.
For many years, most of the individuals in the album were unknown to the gallery, making research difficult.
Then, in 2008, conservationists discovered that the pages and binding of the album were contaminated with arsenic, a toxin that was common in the 1800s before it was recognised as poisonous. This made it unsafe to handle or share with visitors without special precautions.
However, thanks to funding from the Getty’s Paper Project initiative, a digital version of the album has been made available to the public, and the National Portrait Gallery’s curatorial team has revealed the identities of hundreds more of those who sat for Bache.
Over the past few years, the team has matched the names Bache listed with each portrait to real people using the genealogy database Ancestry, which includes early US census reports, birth, marriage, death, immigration records, and family trees dating back centuries.
By sharing the work with the wider public, the curators hope to reveal more about Bache’s subjects, who were primarily ordinary people who wanted their silhouettes made.
Before the advent of photography, silhouettes were the only way for people to have pictures of themselves and their loved ones at home.
The curators hope that as people do their genealogy, relatives can contact the museum if they recognize someone in the album. They also hope the album can help identify unidentified silhouettes in other collections.
