The Reading Hand
Lavater's Physiognomy
How a whole age looked at faces.
- Work
- from the Essays on Physiognomy
- Maker
- Johann Caspar Lavater
- Date
- c. 1789
- Source
- Wellcome Collection, London
Wellcome Collection. Public Domain / CC BY 4.0
Format
The full-resolution scan, color-managed to the source plate — yours to print, study, and explore.
Size
$29.00
The story
A page of faces and silhouettes, ranged so the reader might compare brow to brow and jaw to jaw — plates from Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, the work that made the reading of character from the face a European craze in the 1770s and after. Lavater held that the outward form of a head disclosed the soul within; the silhouette, cheap and exact, became his favourite instrument. The claim was false and, in later hands, dangerous. The plates, engraved with real delicacy, survive as art and as evidence — a record of how a whole age looked at faces, offered here for the history it holds.
See it on your wall
The plate, in your home
Lavater's Physiognomy printed large and framed, hung in rooms like yours. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.
About this reproduction
- A faithful reproduction of a public-domain plate — from the Essays on Physiognomy (1789), held by Wellcome Collection, London. The work was published before 1931 and is centuries out of copyright.
- Printed to order on 200gsm EMA matte art paper; framed pieces sit behind acrylic, no mat.
- Color-managed to the source scan; we correct nothing and invent nothing.
- Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed pieces ship flat-packed).
- If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.
Why our plates cost more than a poster: we print from the highest-resolution scans available, at sizes where the engraving itself becomes visible — the emblem line, the letterpress bite, the registration of colour — on stock made to outlive its owner.
Attribution: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain / CC BY 4.0
