Wiffen, J. H. (McKechnie Section 2)

Recorded by Jackson (Dictionary), who mentions a print of a painted silhouette of Frederick James Post of Islington, as a boy, signed by J. H. Wiffen. It seems improbable that this profilist could have been Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen (1792-1836), the writer, whose works include a translation of Tasso and the Historical Memoirs of the House of Russell (1833), and who died at Woburn Abbey on 2 May 1836. Such a man is hardly likely to have been concerned either with painting silhouettes or engraving prints of them. It is not clear, moreover, whether Jackson's phrase 'born 1819, d. 1855' refers to the artist or to the sitter. Possibly the silhouette print in question was a portrait of J. H. Wiffen as a boy, by Frederick James Post. Jackson mentions that the sitter wore a neck-frill and a cutaway coat (and that he held in his hand a Greek Testament). J. H. Wiffen, as a boy of about thirteen in c. 1805, would have been so dressed. In these problematical circumstances, I have only listed Wiffen as a silhouette artist because Jackson has done so herself.