Ravissante - a photo on Flickriver

Ravissante

            This lovely lady has a rather ravishing silhouette, don’t you think?  Her delicate nose, elegant jawline, high cheekbones, and pouting lips make her profile a delight to view.  In truth, this beauty is in fact an early Twentieth Century German half-doll whom I recently acquired from a curios shop.  You might just be able to make out her painted hair in the shadows of her silhouette.  The day I brought her home, I was playing around with her profile against one of my Art Deco lamps and came up with this as an image quite by chance, which rather took my fancy.  I like the way her elegant features cast in gleaming white glazed porcelain catch just a little in the light, alluding to her beauty hidden within the shadows.  I hope you like her ravishing silhouette as well.  

The "half-doll" is a dainty porcelain or bisque figurine, fashionable in the early Twentieth Century with an upper body, head, arms, but no legs.  These dolls were produced in the thousands at the height of their popularity by German factories such as Dressel and Kister, Heubach, Goebel and Kestner.  Later they were produced in France, America and later still, in Japan.  They commonly served as handles and toppers for fabric covers made for powder boxes on ladies’ dressing tables and small brushes, however they were also made for jewellery boxes, pincushions, tea cosies and other covers.  In this case, my German half-doll is stylised with an Eighteenth Century powdered Marie Antoinette wig and bodice (not that you can really see these details in this particular image), so she would have been made for a lady’s boudoir and was most likely the topper for a jewellery box or powder bowl.  She is of the larger variety and stands at three and a half inches in height and has been hand painted.  

A silhouette is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single colour, usually black, with its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the silhouette is usually presented on a light background, usually white, or none at all. The silhouette differs from an outline, which depicts the edge of an object in a linear form, while a silhouette appears as a solid shape. Silhouette images may be created in any visual artistic medium, but were first used to describe pieces of cut paper, which were then stuck to a backing in a contrasting colour, and often framed.  In the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries silhouettes, then known as “shades”, were at the peak of their popularity. The earliest professional silhouettists were portrait miniaturists, for whom the shade was a simple outline profile filled in with black paint. They were considered the poor man's portrait.  Silhouettes represented a cheap but effective alternative to the portrait miniature, and skilled specialist artists could cut a high-quality bust portrait, by far the most common style, in a matter of minutes, working purely by eye. Other artists, especially from about 1790, drew an outline on paper, then painted it in, which could be equally quick.  The word silhouette is derived from the name of Étienne de Silhouette, a French finance minister who, in 1759, was forced by France's credit crisis during the Seven Years' War to impose severe economic demands upon the French people, particularly the wealthy. Because of de Silhouette's austere economies, his name became synonymous with anything done or made cheaply and so with these outline portraits. Prior to the advent of photography, silhouette profiles cut from black card were the cheapest way of recording a person's appearance.

Taken on: April 20, 2024

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half doll

porcelain doll

old doll

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antique half doll

old half doll

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porcelain

china

pottery

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German doll

German half doll

German

Germany

Deco

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1920s

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Eighteenth Century

18th Century

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Marie Antoinette

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topper

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Edwardian

Edwardiana

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Sets appears in: • Edwardiana • Art Deco more » • Collectables « less

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Camera: Canon DIGITAL IXUS 80 IS, f/2.8, 1/200 sec, 6.2mm, ISO 80 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Canon DIGITAL IXUS 80 IS
Aperture:	f/2.8
Exposure Time:	0.005 sec (1/200)
Focal Length:	6.2mm
ISO:	80
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Off, Did not fire
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Color Space:	sRGB
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