L'aimable Jane and the Jane Austen Silhouette

In this day and age, it is pretty easy to record someone’s likeness – most of us have a camera in our pockets to do just that. Today, most of us walk around snapping away to our heart’s content, taking pictures of ourselves, our friends and family, and every particularly appetising brunch. However, the same was not true of Jane Austen’s lifetime, with the first things we could plausibly recognise as photographs not appearing until the decades after Austen’s death. In fact, we don’t have much to go on when it comes to the portraiture of Austen. There is only one sketch by Jane’s sister Cassandra we can definitively say is Jane’s likeness. However, there are several possible contenders for other portraits of the author, including a silhouette now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery  in London. 

L'aimable Jane 

This silhouette is the subject of our new gift shop collection ‘L’aimable Jane’, arriving in early September 2024. The silhouette was pasted into the back of the second volume of a 2nd edition of Mansfield Park, with the words ‘L’aimable Jane’ written above. Though it is not possible to prove definitively that it is a portrait of Austen, its similarity to Cassandra’s sketch, as well as its presence in a copy of Austen’s work, leaves little room for further speculation. 

So what was silhouette making? Well, as we have already established, photography as we currently understand it had not yet been invented, and not everyone possessed the requisite artistic talent to produce a flattering likeness of their nearest and dearest. Silhouette making provided a relatively straightforward way to take an accurate portrait, even if it was just an outline. 

How was a silhouette made? 

A silhouette was taken by getting the sitter to sit between a large piece of paper affixed to a wall and the light of a bright candle. The artist would then trace the resulting outline of the sitter created by the sharp shadow cast on the paper, creating an accurate profile of the subject. This outline could then be traced onto black paper, and cut out to produce a keepsake profile, or it could be used as the basis for a painting with a little more detail than a cut-out. Of course, this is still something you can try today, either with a candle for the full Regency experience or perhaps with a torch, to get a more consistent light and sharper outline. 

The new Silhouette collection will be available in our online Shop.

Have you ever tried taking a friend’s silhouette? How did it go? Let us know in the comments. 

Ellen White is editor of the Jane Austen blog. If you would like to contribute to the blog, she would love to hear from you. Follow this link for more details.