Faded Elegance

Painted on slightly convex glass in the ‘anti-Etruscan’ style of black against a now apricot background, this rare profile shows a Georgian lady wearing a puffed-out buffon secured on her corsage with a ribbon bow. Her hair is arranged in a banging chignon tied with ribbon and topped with a mob cap.

Despite fading to the background colouring, the silhouette dating to the 1790s is in fine original condition. It resides in a handsome slim-line gold frame with a watch top hanger and is glazed on the reverse to show plaited brown hair with a smaller segment of darker plaited hair lain atop. Opening the frame showed the true colour of the background and revealed a cut-down trade card for a Bath-based apothecary and surgeon.

It was a rival silhouette artist Jacob Spornberg who invented an Etruscan-style of profile. Reminiscent of the red-figure Etruscan pottery invented at Athens about 530 BC, an outline of the sitter was initially drawn in thin black paint against a black ground before the whole was coated in vermilion enamel. It was this striking effect that Rosenberg sought to emulate though he reversed the colours and dubbed it ‘anti-Etruscan’. It would appear though that these silhouettes were not popular as very few examples are recorded.

Born in Vienna, Charles Rosenberg (1745-1844) is thought to have come to England in 1761 as a fourteen-year-old page to Princess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz when she arrived to marry King George III. As a favourite of the King’s, Rosenberg was promoted from page to King’s Messenger and this connection likely explains why he enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage throughout his artistic career. In 1816 Rosenberg and his son were honoured by an invitation to paint a likeness of Princess Charlotte a few days prior to her marriage.

Rosenberg settled in Bath around 1788 and married Elizabeth Woolley at Bath Abbey in September 1790. He initially ran a shop selling jewellery, trinkets and artificial flowers but when his artistic career took off, he advertised ‘an absolute sale’ and became a full-time silhouette artist and drawing master.