Figure 54: Abaissement volontaire de la mâchoire inférieure: mouvement inexpressif (c. 1856, printed 1862): Art, History and Details

Figure 54: Abaissement volontaire de la mâchoire inférieure: mouvement inexpressif (c. 1856, printed 1862) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne (de Boulogne) (French, 1806–1875); Adrien Tournachon (French, 1825–1903).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

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.”

Object facts

• Title: Figure 54: Abaissement volontaire de la mâchoire inférieure: mouvement inexpressif
• Date: c. 1856, printed 1862
• Creator attribution: Guillaume-Benjamin-Amand Duchenne (de Boulogne) (French, 1806–1875); Adrien Tournachon (French, 1825–1903)
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: Albumen print from glass plate negative
• Dimensions: 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.)
• Collection: PH - French 19th Century
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2018.11

A detail from the museum

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

Collection credit

Severance and Greta Millikin Trust

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.