Augustin Edouart always cut his silhouette portraits in duplicate: one cutting was for his client, the other was for his personal archive. The latter copy would typically be annotated on the reverse with the sitter’s name, the place and the date. In addition to these archive albums, Edouart also kept scrapbooks in which he pasted practice and experimental cuttings. Unfortunately nearly all the artist’s albums perished when Edouart was shipwrecked en route home from the USA to France in 1849. The few albums that were salvaged from the sea were gifted to the family in Guernsey that offered him shelter following his rescue.*It’s now known that Edouart did retain a small part of his record including a Scrapbook of cuttings which emerged a few years ago in a Paris bookstore. Filled mostly with cuttings of dogs, this scrapbook also contained some figure cuttings and miscellaneous props that Edouart would have typically included in his large conversation pieces. That scrapbook has bee...