AUGUSTA.- The Maine State Museum presents the exhibit Profiles of His Time: The Silhouette Portraits by Galen Jerome Brewer. The exhibit’s inspiration dates to March 2004, when generous anonymously-donated funds allowed the museum to acquire a rare and important collection of 238 silhouette portraits made by the heart and hand of a Brewer, Maine man, Galen Jerome Brewer. Fifty of these silhouettes are shown in the exhibit.

The exhibited silhouettes include Brewer’s intricately cut profiles portraying his family, friends, and a variety of people whom he met on his travels in and outside of Maine. One such trip in 1856 took Brewer to the then Dutch colony of Suriname in South America. There, Brewer cut profiles of Dutch residents, as well as the slaves whom the Dutch held to work in homes or on coffee and sugar plantations.

In each silhouette, Brewer made certain to include the date and location where he cut it, as well as the sitter’s name, age, and home. This important information has contributed greatly to the collection’s intellectual value and interpretation.

Galen Jerome Brewer was born in 1819 in Brewer Village, named for his grandfather, Colonel John Brewer, who in 1770 established the first grist mills at the site of what today is South Brewer. Brewer was a farmer with carpentry skills, a bass violin player, music teacher, and vocalist in the community choir. He also served as secretary to the Brewer Village Lyceum, a debating society of timely moral and political questions. He was appointed to help write the mission and policies of the first Brewer Village Public Library.

Brewer probably began cutting silhouette portraits in 1844 and continued for thirteen years until 1856. Later, he only made a few, his last portraying his daughter Maude in 1887. Brewer’s specific profile-cutting techniques are not known. Like other profilists of the day, he probably traced a life-size shadow of each sitter. Using a type of pantograph, possibly one he devised himself, he then reduced the life-sized profile to less than three inches. With a knife, he cut the profile out of the center of a light-toned piece of paper, creating a “hollow-cut” that he mounted on contrasting paper to reveal the dark portrait bust.

Through a time-line tracing the art of profile-taking from 1699 to the turn of the twentieth century, the exhibit also places Galen Jerome Brewer’s silhouette profiles in the context of efforts by Europeans and Americans to capture and keep the likenesses of family members, friends, or well-known people.

Profiles of His Time: The Silhouette Portraits by Galen Jerome Brewer will continue on view at the museum through August 2006.