Silhouette artists - Biographies and work details

This section contains an extensive selection of material about the professional cutters and painters who have made silhouettes over the last 250 years.  Using the Search box or Artist Index menu to the left, you can obtain introductory biographies, and detailed entries about the artists - covering their output, the materials and methods they used and where they worked.

Volunteers working on the Profiles project have compiled the introductory biographies we offer in this section. Where further information is available, we offer additional, longer entries, written by silhouette experts. We offer three sources of expert commentary, work by Mrs Sue McKechnie (Author of, British Silhouette Artists and their Work 1760-1860), work by Miss Diana Joll, the former Secretary of the Silhouette Collectors Club, this material having originally been printed in the SCC newsletters, published 1993 to 2016, and work by Mr Brian Wellings.  We are also progressively adding additional information to the system, drawn from primary source materials such as newspapers  - see the graphic to the right.

Update to the above, 12 May 2026 - Further to Diana Joll's death in 2019, Brian Wellings, Ian Cross and Charles Burns have become our priciple consultatants.  Since 2022, Brian has updated over 90 of the artists' biographis offered on this website and he continues to work on these records.

While every effort has been made to ensure that all appropriate information is included in the material offered, and that entries use good grammar and accurate spelling, we would appreciate users emailing us with comments relating to errors and omissions in the biographies and expert commentaries, in order that we can correct details as required.