Adrien Tournachon

(French, 1825-1903)

Albumen print from glass plate negative

Image: 16.4 x 12.2 cm (6 7/16 x 4 13/16 in.); Paper: 22.7 x 17.3 cm (8 15/16 x 6 13/16 in.); Mounted: 41.1 x 27.4 cm (16 3/16 x 10 13/16 in.)

Severance and Greta Millikin Trust 2018.11

Location

not on view

Fun Fact

Duchenne, a neurologist at a hospital for the poor in Paris, turned to photography to record the grammar of human expression.

Description

Duchenne described this model, a former shoemaker, as “an old, toothless man, with a thin face, whose features, without being absolutely ugly, approached ordinary triviality.” When criticized for using such an unattractive model, Duchenne held him up as proof that “every human face could become spiritually beautiful through the accurate rendering of his or her emotions.”

Inscriptions

Inscription

On the verso, lower left, in graphite, “fig 54”

Inscription Remark

The handwriting of the inscription matches the handwriting of the inscriptions on the other four Duchenne photographs, one of which has a European style 1.

Provenance

?-2017

(Serge Kakou, Paris, France)

2017–18

(Robert Hershkowitz, Ltd., Sussex, United Kingdom)

February 26, 2018-

sold to The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

Citations

Liberatore, Virginia, and G.-B. Duchenne. Performing the Passions between Classical and Modern Epistemes: Text and Photography in Duchenne De Boulogne's "Mécanisme De La Physionomie Humaine". 2002.

Duchenne, G.-B., and R. Andrew Cuthbertson. The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression. 2006.

Prodger, Phillip. Darwin's Camera: Art and Photography in the Theory of Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

The Cleveland Museum of Art

Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine