A form of paper art was the making of portrait silhouettes. The person to be captured in the art form was seated behind white paper. A candle was lit and placed behind the sitter who's profile was then cast onto the white paper. A machine was used which marked and reduced the shadow. The reduced silhouettes was cut from black paper, mounted and framed.

Silhouettes were a cheap form of portraiture that became especially popular once Lavater’s publications were known, being used to analyse racial and personal characteristics supposedly perceivable in the shape of the head. Aboriginal profiles by Fernyhough and his imitators would have provided English buyers, in particular, with another racial type to which they could apply current phrenological and physiognomical theories.

Richard Neville on William Henry Fernyhough, Design & Art Australia Online, 2011

‘Esq’ – short for Esquire – denoted that Dumaresq considered himself a gentleman or a person of rank.

A French bureaucrat by the name of Etienne de Silhouette created this form of portraiture in Paris, France in the mid- 1700's. Etienne was the French Minister of Finance, and was just as well-known for cutting "shades" of people as he was for cutting the budget to the bone.

http://www.silhouette-man.com/History.html