Auguste Edouard (d.1861), a Frenchman, embarked on his prolific career as a silhouette artist in 1825, travelling to England, Scotland, Ireland and finally, the United States in 1839. In 1849, he returned to France but his entire stock of commission duplicates (numbering 50,000) was lost in a shipwreck off the island of Guernsey that year causing Eduoard to abruptly end his career in despair (G.C. Groce, The New York Historical Society's Dictionary of Artists in America, 1957, p.207).