Horrible face

This image was made by an eighteenth-century “physiognomist” (a term used at the time to describe someone who tried to judge people’s character from their faces) called Johann C. Lavater. This one he simply calls ‘horrible face’! I don’t suppose many people – especially not psychologists or other scientists – today would come up with that phrase, and again it shows how different our ideas about expression are now. In the past emotions and their expression were often discussed in moral terms.