Facts or faces, or, The mutual connexion between linear and mental portraiture morally considered, and pictorially illustrated by a series of graphic heads of all the dispositions of the mind : with a dissertation on personal beauty, showing what it is, and what is mistaken for it, by a comprehensive view of constructive, ornamental, and expressive beauty, and their relative importance to each other also, an essay on complexion of character / by Thomas Woolnorth.

  • Woolnorth, Thomas.
Date:
1852
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Facts or faces, or, The mutual connexion between linear and mental portraiture morally considered, and pictorially illustrated by a series of graphic heads of all the dispositions of the mind : with a dissertation on personal beauty, showing what it is, and what is mistaken for it, by a comprehensive view of constructive, ornamental, and expressive beauty, and their relative importance to each other also, an essay on complexion of character / by Thomas Woolnorth. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    it is very provoking to find that where the painter is really the most in fault, it happens to be just in those points where he is considered the least so by those who should be taught that it is a libel upon Nature, (in the way she is generally represented,) to say she can be flattered; hence it is we have so many futile attempts to shew that she can be, which are not only gratefully acknowledged, but become as it were the approved failings of the mechanic in the art, who finds by experience that if he can only treat his subjects with bright eyes, rosy cheeks, and fine complexions they are willing to part with their money and their intellect too. If such Portraits of our humanity are intended for cases that ai‘e never to be opened, or rooms that are never to be entered, well and good: but if they are to be made a public exhibition, or rather spectacle of, it may be well said with Macbeth— “ There is no speculation in those eyes which thou dost glare withand when he exclaims—“ Time was men could not live when their brains were out;” if such pictures speak the truth, they go a great way to shew the possibility of it. The failure of whole-length Portraits, which is of such fre- quent occurrence, may not arise from a deficiency in the know- ledge and practice of art so much as a want of union or adapta- tion of the constituent parts of the body to the right formation of the whole. It should be recollected that there is as much Portraiture in the hands and feet as in the face; that they severally belong to one subject, as certainly as they can belong to no other; and that all the individuality of the figure contri- butes to the making up of that general character of it by which persons are able to distinguish one another before they turn their faces ; others are to be known by an indistinct outline at almost any distance, and some are not even to be lost in a fog. The ablest artists are sometimes made sensible of this, in instances where they have furnished a correct likeness of the face, and might have done as much for the rest, had their originals only found the necessary time and patience to sit to them for it: for want of these adjuncts they have had recourse to lay figures, or others about as unlike the original upon which