Family Profiling

This delightful family group – military father, elegant mother and cute child – are delicately painted on convex glass and backed with silk. The mother and child are painted in a similar style: the face in black and the costume nicely detailed in transparency with the silk backing adding texture. The uniformed father is painted in black with gum arabic and gold highlights and, unlike the others, is without a bust-line termination. The parents have matching drum and sword hangers.

The silhouettes are each backed with the original cream silk packed behind with old cotton wool padding; they reside in their original papier-mâché frames. Two profiles are then backed with old playing cards, the other has inside a cut-down hand-written appointment card bearing the name E Turner dated 1814.

P. H. Rogers was born and educated in Plymouth. He is mostly known for his landscape views of the Plymouth area which he exhibited. He painted very few silhouettes suggesting it may have been an artform used solely to paint family and friends during the early 1800s.