Pearce, Benjamin, the Younger (McKechnie Section 1)

The son of Benjamin Pearce the elder (q.v.); recorded by Woodiwiss (British Silhouettes). Pearce's known work falls outside our period, but I have included him since he may well have produced silhouettes before 1860 which may come to light, and details of his movements, and of his later silhouettes, may provide clues to attribution.

As I have mentioned in the entry on his father, Pearce is said to have produced embellished copies of some of the latter's work. The son worked in a more decorative style than his father and any late nineteenth-century silhouettes signed ‘Pearce’ are likely to be by him.

Woodiwiss mentions that Pearce is known to have worked in Bristol, Bath, Lancaster and Shrewsbury, and (in 1892) in Bournemouth (at ‘The Post Office Arcade’), where he took a silhouette of a little boy in a sailor suit and straw hat, against a lightly painted landscape background, in that year. He was working as late as 1901 when, in Bournemouth, he took a full-length profile of Lavinia Spencer, later Lady Annaly; it is now at Althorp, the home of the Right Hon. the Earl Spencer. Mr Graham Robinson owns a silhouette by Pearce of ‘Prince’, the Pearce family's dog, dated 31 December 1901. Apparently Pearce often signed his silhouettes on the front.