Silhouette

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˌsɪ.lʊˈwɛt/

Definitions

  1. A dark outline or shape visible against a lighter background, it serves to emphasize the contours and form of an object without detailing its interior colors or textures
  2. A striking figure or shadow created by the contrast between an object and its environment, revealing the basic shape while obscuring details and hues
  3. A solid, dark shape or profile seen against a contrasting lighter space, highlighting an object's overall form while hiding fine details

Etymology: For eight months in 1759, Étienne de Silhouette held the purse strings of France, and Paris never forgave him. Appointed Controller-General of Finances on 4 March, in the middle of the ruinously expensive Seven Years' War, he set about cutting costs with a zeal that the court and the salons found intolerable. By 21 November he was gone, and his name had become a joke. The name itself was older than the joke and came from the Pyrenees. It was a French spelling of the Basque surname Ziloeta or Zilhoeta, modern Zulueta, built on "zulo," meaning "hole, pit, hiding place." Roughly, it meant the place of the holes. Parisians mocked his economies by calling anything done on the cheap "à la Silhouette." One explanation for the picture that now bears his name is that a profile filled in with flat black, instead of a properly painted portrait, was exactly that kind of economy: a likeness stripped to its bare minimum. Another points to the man himself, who made outline portraits to decorate his château at Bry-sur-Marne, east of Paris. A third links the fleeting outline to his fleeting time in office. These explanations need not compete. Whichever weighed most, the name stuck to the picture. The craft was not new. Profiles cut from black paper or painted on card were already popular, and English speakers called them "shades" or "profiles." The French name crossed the Channel unchanged by the end of the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century it widened from the parlour portrait to any dark shape seen against light, such as a figure in a doorway or a skyline at dusk. Later it also came to mean the outline of a dress or figure in fashion. A verb followed, formed from the noun.

Synonyms: outline, contour, shape, shadow, profile