May one see it?
Washington, D.C., United States
The owner is known. Whether it is on view today, the museum does not say, and we were not trained to guess.
Silverpoint was an unusual medium for a miniaturist, yet more than half of David Boudon’s work incorporates this exacting drawing technique. To draw with silverpoint, the artist took a wooden stick fitted with a silver tip and drew on his prepared paper. The pale, silvery lines quickly tarnished, leaving a darker, warm brown color. Andre Joseph Villard appears to have been a wealthy Virginia planter. In 1794 his daughter Constance married fellow Virginian William Hutt, who moved the family to Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1799.
Smithsonian American Art Museum