Essais d'autographie/ Essai de physiognomie 1842 - 1845

Essais d'autographie/ Essai de physiognomie is a lithograph made by Rodolphe Töpffer, though the exact date is unknown. Töpffer was a Swiss-French teacher, writer, painter, and cartoonist, and he is considered the father of the modern comic strip. Here, he gives us a grotesque portrait of a man and a dog. The man is dressed in the fashion of the late 18th century with an enormous hat, while his small dog sits dutifully at his feet. We see Töpffer’s interest in physiognomy, a pseudoscience popular in the 18th and 19th centuries that claimed to reveal a person’s character through their physical appearance. Töpffer was invested in education, and maybe this print tries to teach us about the ways we assess people at first glance. The print hints at the era’s rigid class structures through the man’s archaic dress and the dog’s pose of subservience. It makes me consider what aspects of a person or even an image catch my eye and how I make snap judgements based on very little.