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The Slack Family Silhouettes
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The Silhouette was done in 1844 by Augustus Eduoard. he was a French artist from France, of
course, and he travelled back and forth to the United States in certain periods and he would do
the silhouette cutting. Of course he did very famous people, like Daniel Webster, and I have a
book about it which I'll tell you about. But at that time, of course, I didn't know mush about the
silhouette when my aunt gave it to me. My uncle, Dr. Major really gave it to me after she died;
and when we moved in this house he said it was a shame not for it to be somewhere for people to
see it, so he let me have it. Anyway there was a man that wrote the book. Well we were on an
airplane, going somewhere, my husband and I, and we read- you know how Delta and all of them
put out these little books- we're reading in it, and there was an exhibit by Augustus Eduoard in
New York, not New York, in Washington (D.C.), at the Smithsonian; and so, we said, well, I'd
write to them, maybe, and they could tell me, you know, something about it. So I did. And so
they sent me back... but I wrote to him.
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Detail
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And we had a correspondence, and he told me, yes, he was
writing about all of this Edouard's work and that he did many people, of course, in Louisiana, but
the reason he did family groups sometimes, and things like this was because in the summer he
travelled to the different resort areas, like Hot Springs, New Orleans, and evidently he was in the
New Orleans area, and my family, the Slack family, got him to cut these. He was well known
throughout the United States, and there were three (silhouette cutters) at the time, I think, that
did this sort of work. But he was well known as one of the best because he did people exactly like
they look. I mean he didn't compliment you at all. If you had a pointed nose it came out that way.
But this particular one, the man that wrote this book said that, after I wrote to him, that this was
the only one he knew of that had eleven figures, that was available today, but they're around and
there are some; and he said one was at the Smithsonian in this exhibit. Well, it was just a
temporary thing, it wasn't there for me to ever see it. But I've seen a few more, well my aunt had
one, that he did, of one person, and I think there was one of two (people), but I don't know who
they were.
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