Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin
1818
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Portraits of Georges Arnold Fitzwilliam and Portrait of Eleanor Ramsay Fitzwilliam; a pair is a 1818 by Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see two side-by-side profiles: a man in a dark coat and a woman in a high-necked dress, both drawn in crisp black and white. The artist used a *physiognotrace*—a tracing machine—to get the shapes exact. It was like a 19th-century photocopier, letting him churn out portraits fast for wealthy clients. These two were a British merchant and his American wife, sitting in New York while the artist, a French exile, worked. Look up *chiaroscuro* to see how artists play light and shadow like this.
This pair of portraits depict George Fitzwilliam, an English merchant, and his American wife Eleanor Ramsay Fitzwilliam, who sat in New York for the French émigré artist Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin. Saint-Mémin used a recently invented mechanical device called a physiognotrace to trace accurate profiles of his sitters, which he then completed in black and white chalks. The technology enabled Saint-Mémin to establish a thriving business catering to prominent Americans—including Presidents Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and several Native…
The physiognotrace device used to create this portrait consisted of a wooden frame within which a sitter posed in profile; the artist then peered through an eyepiece and followed the contour and features of the sitter’s face by maneuvering a graphite pencil attached to the mechanism.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin (French pronunciation: ; 1770–1852) was a French portrait painter and museum director.
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