A Soft Cap

This silhouette is distinctive for being painted on convex plaster pre-moulded to fit the curve of the glass. This technique was uniquely practised by John Smith of Edinburgh who worked as a silhouette artist for a decade from the late 1780s. It shows a lady with her hair in a looped chignon under a soft-crowned hat trimmed at the front with a ribbon bow.

The silhouette is set in the original pressed brass frame backed with the artist’s unbroken trade label. It is inscribed in ink with what may be the artist’s personal inventory record – No. 497.

Smith was based on North Bridge Street in central Edinburgh and first advertised in 1788 as a hair and pearl worker who had perfected a way to take, reduce and finish shades. He offered an animated and ‘most striking polite resemblance’. A year later he visited Aberdeen where he advertised a perfectly new and superior plan that guaranteed ‘exact symmetry’ and ‘an animated expression’.