A Honeywell Silhouette

I found this little silhouette (I cropped and enlarged the image so you could see the writing) in a box made my great great grandfather Thomas Reed (1828-1904) of West Chester, Pennsylvania and Brooklyn, New York. He was a cabinet maker and carpenter.

I've gone through the box many times and seen this little picture often, but never thought to research it before. On Peggy McClard's website about 18th and 19th century silhouette artists I was able to locate the artist right away. On her site you can see that M.A.(Martha) Honeywell always wrote the same tagline at the bottom of her works: "Cut without hands by M.A. Honeywell."

Martha Honeywell was born about 1787 in New Hampshire without hands and with only one foot. However, she was a silhouette artist from childhood and travelled up and down the eastern seaboard (and to Europe) demonstrating her abilities. There were several silhouette artists in the 19th century who worked without hands or arms, but Martha Honeywell was one of the very few women in this category.

Miss Honeywell also wrote out the Lord's Prayer on tiny circles of paper and pasted them onto decorative papers. She wrote with her mouth. The Reeds had one of these too:



I was unable to enlarge it without blurring, but this is the Lord's Prayer and at the bottom is Martha Honeywell's tagline, as on the silhouette.

She died in 1848, so this must have been acquired by the Reeds on one of Honeywell's tours. They lived in West Chester until after the Civil War, so Miss Honeywell must have visited that town at some time.

For more information, please see:

Silhouette Artists Born Without Arms - an excellent site with a very scholarly biography of Martha Honeywell, highly recommended!