Moses Williams was an American artist before the United States were united. While he was not necessarily born a slave, his parents were; and when they were traded to Wilson Peale as payment for a painting, and when Peale subsequently emancipated them from the arrangement, The Fugitive Slave Act forced Peale to retain the Williams’ 12 year old child, Moses, into a quasi-adoption until Moses turned 28. Moses was raised with Peale’s other 17 children - and while he sat at the table, he did live in a separate structure and he did not get the same education as the others.
Peale taught Moses how to operate a special, new machine that created silhouette portraits and they set up shop in the Museum, built in 1786. The portraits were cheap - eight cents - and affordable to everyone, so they became fashionable. Moses’s work was signed “Museum,” and there were times when it was Peale at the machine, but for the most part it was the talent of Moses Williams that popularized the art form.
As the founding fathers drew from antiquity to design the perfect democracy, the silhouette fit neatly into the philosophies and thought experiments: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave tells the story of a shadow as a proxy for what casts the shadow. It is when the observer turns their head to see the source of the shadow that enlightenment sparks from the more complete understanding of the object. The silhouette portrait, even though it portrays the viewer as the subject, suggests that the profile of the viewer is the turn of head that breaks the spell of ignorance.
In short: a dumb law forced a white man to adopt a black child, whom he taught to use a French robot to create portraits of white people as black people so that they could look smart.
Questions:
What are the attributes of a silhouette?
How does the silhouette cutter arrange his subject?
Does a silhouette cutter “draw?”
What is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave?
What was the Fugitive Slave Act?