Quaker Profiles, Pictorial and Biographical, 1750-1850 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Quaker Profiles, Pictorial and Biographical, 1750-1850. By Anna Cox Brinton. Wallingford, Pennsylvania: Pendle Hill Publications. 1964. viii, 55 pages. Illustrations, bibliography. $1.50. This little paperback adds to Mrs. Brinton's distinguished bibliography a work of endearing charm. The outward theme is the silhouette, the favored form of portraiture in Quaker life, and a form, with its stark simplicity and often vivid revelation of character, essentially true to the Quaker spirit. The profiles are, indeed, a vehicle rather than a theme, and the true subject of this book is Quaker character and manners. There are individual sketches of Dr. John Fothergill, Rebecca Jones, Nicholas Wain, Captain Paul Cuffe, Hester Savory, Susanna Sansom, Drs. Joseph and Isaac Parrish, and Joseph Sturge, a cast selected for their contrasting careers as well as for the qualities which united them, and seventeen silhouettes appear as illustrations. In her Introduction, Mrs. Brinton describes silhouette-making techniques in brief, and reviews their history. Her Conclusion draws the whole theme together around a group cutting of Elizabeth Fry with her family, bringing solace to a prisoner. Little has been written on this subject since Mrs. Brinton's pioneer article, "Quaker Profiles," in this magazine (Vol. XXIX [1940], No. 1), and the present work emphasizes the need for further study rather than filling it. Behind the name of Dr. John Pole, who made the Cuffe silhouette, there is an interesting story of an Anglo-American family interested in the arts. It should be noted also, on the other hand, that the lively Mrs. Patience Lovell Wright did not, by any reliable evidence, make profiles in wax or paper, and that the head of John Fothergill attributed to her here is almost certainly a work of the English Huguenot artist in wax, Isaac Gösset. The exploration of these matters, however, would have been out of place in this little book, whose purpose is only to be itself a profile both of a simple and delicate art and of the way of life so congenial toit. Dickinson CollegeCharles Coleman Sellers Quakers in Russia. By Richenda C. Scott. London: Michael Joseph. 1964. 302 pages. Illustrations. 30 s. This delightfully written and profusely annotated book with its apt foreword by Henry J. Cadbury will be welcomed by Friends and others who are interested in dialogue between West and East. It will have a particular appeal to those whose forbears or contemporary kinsmen have taken part in the episodes so vividly narrated. At the outset, an enlightening chapter, written with sympathy and appreciation of both the Quaker and the Russian background, sets in perspective the more than two hundred years' experience of individuals and groups in penetrating this enormous and unfamiliar empire. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century 49 ...