The courtin'
A Boston poem in New England dialect by James Russell Lowell, published by J.R. Osgood and Company in 1874, with silhouette illustrations of rustic courtship. The black silhouettes on cream paper show a seated woman at a spindle-back chair, a bent figure at her work, and a suitor leaning in, with the stiff profiles and sparse props of a rural parlour; a designer could take the bold, flat cut-paper shapes and the economy of pose and prop as a model for graphic silhouettes.
