It’s always pleasing to find a pair of silhouettes that have successfully stayed together for generations. Neatly painted on convex glass by William Hamlet the Elder, these silhouettes show an unnamed couple: he wears a double-breasted coat over a frilled chemise and a waistcoat with a standing collar; his wife wears a décolleté dress with a delicately figured ruff collar fill-in and a gipsy style hat with a flat crown. She has accessorised her outfit with a pearl necklace and hoop earrings.*The profiles are painted on glass in black with transparent shades of grey adding costume detail and texture. A needle has been used to scratch the gent’s side-whiskers and the lady’s curls. Both profiles are backed with white plaster and housed in traditional papier-mâché frames with matching rose hangers. The gentleman is backed with the artist’s unbroken label in Hamlet’s own handwriting – ‘Hamlet / Profile Painter / 17 Union Passage / Bath’. The following two lines have faded to become ...