Before photography, the silhouette was a popular form of portraiture more affordable than oil painting, where the outline of a face in profile was cut in black. “It was very popular to have a ...

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery will present “Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now,” opening May 11, as the first major museum exhibition to explore the art form of cut-paper profiles in ...

How a curator unlocked the secrets in an arsenic-laced portrait album Carly Pippin, Getty But the camera has yet to be invented, so no photographer documents your first kiss, and no photo booth ...

Silhouettes—cut paper profiles—were a hugely popular and democratic form of portraiture in the 19th century, offering virtually instantaneous likenesses of everyone from presidents to those who were ...

The album’s fragile pages were laced with arsenic, so the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery put the images online last month. Curators have since identified more than 1,000 of the 1,800 subjects ...