Blank greetings card with envelope featuring:

William Blake NPG 1809

© National Portrait Gallery, London

by James Deville

Deville was a sculptor and phrenologist employed as a young assistant by Joseph Nollekens from whom no doubt he learned the technique of taking life-masks with the help of straws to prevent suffocation. The mask was taken when Blake was aged sixty-five so that the phrenologist could have a cast of Blake's head 'as representative of the imaginative faculty'. It failed however to please his family and friends; George Richmond said that the unnatural severity of the mouth was caused by the discomforture of... more

Card size: 125mm x 175mm

Images are printed in their original proportions, within a white border.