![]() ![]() It became available in a pocket edition and was much sought after by artists. Physiognomy was popularized during Ducreux’s lifetime by Johann Kaspar Lavater, who wrote a tract illustrated in the English edition with drawings by William Blake and Johann Heinrich Fuseli of various facial “types” set against neutral backgrounds. These became the basis of a French art school exercise called the “tête d’expression” - studies of faces intended to evoke particular states of mind. Building on ideas promulgated by the Italian Giambattista della Porta in the early 17th century, the French painter and pedagogue Charles Le Brun provided a guide to an extensive range of facial expressions. The pseudoscience of physiognomy - the idea that faces reveal character, intelligence (think “highbrow,” “lowbrow”), hereditary predisposition and even criminality - had widespread currency well before Ducreux’s time. Ducreux’s gesture, his whole comportment, is so extreme, so over-the-top that it leaps out of its own category to become something unique - not quite caricature, not quite burlesque and more full-throated than a mere studio exercise. It is a self-portrait - one of many in which Ducreux (who felt great affection, one suspects, for his mirror) affects unusual poses and tries out facial expressions intended to communicate jealousy, surprise, mockery or, in this case, fatigue.īut it’s more than just fatigue, isn’t it? That is what’s so wonderful about it. This picture, however, is neither regal nor tragic.
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