Source question 37. 31 32 33 34 36 37 8 GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE. ACT-H31 1 1 most silhouettes, Brown’s figures stood, sat, walked, and rode horses. In particular, his 1846 book, Portrait Gallery of Distinguished American Citizens, displayed the potential of the full-length format. An astute observer, Brown captured each subject’s character through details of posture, dress, gesture, and movement. Brown didn’t limit himself to depicting lone individuals either. His twenty-five-foot-long portrayal of the St. Louis Fire Company, including a fire engine and sixty-five men. Additionally, Brown supplemented some of his silhouettes with paint and ink, such as in Hauling the Whole Week’s Picking, which showed nine people, four mules, three dogs, two oxen, and two wagons containing cotton. The paint, in a range of brown and yellow tones, bring a breath of immediacy into the scene, as if the workers have just left the field. In the 1850s, photography became inexpensive, and demand for silhouettes nearly disappeared. Fortunately, Brown found work as a train engineer, a profession he had trained for as a youth. Even more, fortunately he had already created a body of work, his silhouettes represent the pinnacle of the art.
