About William Bache

Silhouette Art of Early America is a data visualization project inspired by the work of William Bache, an early ninteenth century artist who created thousands of silhouette portraits. These delicate cut paper profiles capture both likeness and mystery offering a unique glimpse into early American identity and artistry. Traveling throughout the eastern seaboard of the United States and to the Caribbean and Cuba, Bache captured American society from politicians, everyday men, women, and children. Inexpensive to create these sihouettes were kept as mementos, placed inside a locket, added to a family album or just shared with family members.

This project transforms over 1800 of his silhouettes into interactive data, highlighting both named and unidentified figures across gender that can be explored, filtered, and traced. Like many similar silhouette artisans', one of the techniques used involved carefully tracing a person's profile using a device called a physiognotrace. The outlines and ‘tracing’ of these profiles is visualized here. Any combination of silhouettes can be selected and explored. This project invites one to explore these portraits not just as silhouettes but as a window into the image of early America.

Thanks & credits

TThis digital project is inspired by work supported through the Getty Foundation’s Paper Project initiative. It draws upon materials from the Smithsonian Institution’s Open Access collections, including the digitized ledger book of silhouette artist William Bache (ca.1803–1812) and his silhouette album held by the National Portrait Gallery. The Bache album of portraits of early nineteenth century sitters was fully digitized thanks to Getty support and the National Portrait Gallery’s ongoing conservation and research efforts.

Bache Album information: https://npg.si.edu/bache/

In addition, this project utilises the Smithsonian Revolutionary Era Collections dataset, a curated subset of the Smithsonian’s Open Access corpus created by the Revolution Crossroads initiative. The dataset brings together 12,667 records and nearly 3,941 linked images of objects dating from 1770–1810, drawn from four Smithsonian museums: the National Museum of American History, the National Postal Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery.

Dataset (CC0-1.0): https://huggingface.co/RevolutionCrossroads

Data visualization design by Neven Armanios.

Silhouette outline extraction using OpenCV edge detection by
Thiago Hersan
Dataset:https://github.com/PGDV-5200-2025F-A/silhouettes

Webcam integration from huggingface
Hue Huynh