Blank greetings card with envelope featuring:

William Blake NPG 1809a

© National Portrait Gallery, London

after James Deville

James Deville was a sculptor, a publisher of marked-up phrenological busts and the owner of a museum of phrenological casts. He made this plaster life-mask of the artist Wiliam Blake to be 'representative of the imaginative faculty'. As was often the case with life masks, cast directly from the subject's face, it was a disappointing likeness. One of Blake's friends noted that the unnatural severity of the mouth was caused by the discomfort of the process 'as the plaster pulled out a quantity of hair'.

Card size: 125mm x 175mm

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