Eighty-One Faces

The Public Domain Review has posted Genevieve Stebbins' Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression (1886). Stebbins gives the eyebrow nine positions and the upper eyelid nine, and notes that together they make 81 faces. She drew 18 of them. Here are all 81, each drawn from her own description, with her readings beside them.

The brow positions move two parts: the end near the nose, which Stebbins calls "ex.", and the rest of the brow, "con.". Each part can stay put, rise or fall. The lid positions are given against the eye: "lid touches top of iris", "lid falls to top of pupil", "lid completely shut". Her meanings are quoted from the 1886 text; the drawing is mine.

Her nine named pairs

The book has a small trap. In the text the abbreviations put the brow first and the lid second, and she says so. Above Chart XI a note says the opposite, "the brow is the final term, the upper lid the first". So the same "con.-ex." means two different faces depending on the page.

The PDR's numbers, and one date

The post says both brow and lid have nine positions, which makes 81 combinations, and that she gave 18. All three numbers are in the book: "By combining nine of the brow with nine of the lid eighty-one distinct combinations can be made. We here present eighteen combinations." The post also calls Swedenborg "the seventeenth-century theologian". He was born in 1688, but he wrote his theology in the last 28 years of his life, up to 1772. That makes him an eighteenth-century theologian.

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