[Paper Silhouette Portrait of a Woman]

Silhouettes and photographs share a similar origin in the cast shadow. Tracing a person's shadow created a silhouette portrait that served as an enduring reminder of a fleeting presence-an elegy based on the simple principles of light and dark-while fixing a shadow chemically resulted in some of the earliest known photographs, which were themselves silhouettes of leaves placed directly on sensitized paper. However, the first photographic process, unveiled in 1839, was the daguerreotype, which produced a unique image on a highly polished sheet of copper. The daguerreotype quickly became popular for portraiture and began to encroach upon the territory of talented miniature painters and silhouettists such as T. P. Jones, the maker of the silhouette reproduced in this daguerreotype. This object is essentially a portrait of a portrait-both a keepsake and a reproduction that suggests the replacement of one American portrait tradition with another.