"Voltaire after Hubert" – Original Etching

Original etching by English painter and engraver Thomas Holloway, ca. 1791, who created these thirty-three head portraits of the French philosopher after illustrations by Swiss painter Jean Huber for Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, London, Bensley, 1789-98.  Toning and scattered foxing, irregularly trimmed, overall in fine condition.  7.5 x 9.25 inches (19 x 23.5 cm.).
In 1772, in a note to French patron of the arts Madame du Deffand, Voltaire writes: "Since you have seen Monsieur Huber, he will do your portrait; he will do it in pastel, in oils, or in mezzotint.  With scissors he will make a cutout sketch of you as a complete caricature.  This is the way he ridiculed me from one end of Europe to the other."  Huber popularised the art of the silhouette, and worked without even making an initial sketch.  His talent for cutouts allowed him to create the most complicated scenes of fights and chases; sometimes he would produce thick forests leaving distant plains and mountains to be imagined; his illustrations showed inimitable fine details.  His "scenes of" made him famous, as well as his irreverent caricatures of Voltaire.  Johann Caspar Lavater was a Swiss theologian and philosopher known throughout Europe for his studies on physiognomy.

Following the physiognomy tradition of Della Porta and of many Renaissance and Baroque philosophers, he believed that the character of a person could be elucidated through examining their “lines of countenance" i.e. tracing a profile outline portrait.  Being able to "read outside" was the key to "know the inside".  Lavater's thought largely influenced art in the late 18th and early 19th century, as in the case of Johann Fuseli and William Blake (who realized two etchings for Lavater's English edition of his Essay).  Lavater was convinced that he could show his theories by analyzing the portraits of some of the main historical figures of the past, in some cases taken from paintings or (mainly for antiquity) sculptures.  Some of the engravings in his volume, made by great masters of the time, are still considered today as graphic masterpieces. (20490)

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