Pieces of white cotton embroidered with cream colored silk in a design of conventional flower and bird forms.

Light natural colored linen embroidered with yellow and blue silk, both in solid embroidery and with drawn work, in a border design.

Messerschmidt, the leading sculptor at the court in Vienna in the 1760s, was forced, for personal and professional reasons, to leave for the provinces and by 1777 had settled in Pressburg (today Bratislava). There he concentrated on a private series of heads, completing more than sixty in his preferred medium of tin alloy or in alabaster.While acknowledging the artistic tradition of exploring facial expressions and emotions, these Kopfstücke, or head pieces, as he called them, were highly original for their combination of realism and abstraction. Visitors to his studio observed the artist studying himself in a mirror. Some of the heads are straightforward self-portraits, smiling or frowning; others are satirical or comic, the sitter reacting to a strong odor or yawning widely. A few, such as this one, called “refusers” by an early critic for the way they deny contact with their surroundings, are deeply introspective.The meaning of the series has been long debated. The titles were conferred after the sculptor’s death, when forty-nine works were exhibited in 1793. Messerschmidt was aware of contemporary medical theories, such as Johann Caspar Lavater’s 1775study of physiognomy’s relation to human character, and he certainly knew his Viennese neighbor the physician Franz Anton Mesmer, who believed that outward senses connect to inner emotions and developed related therapies to treat his patients. However one assesses it, the series of is exceptional in eighteenth-century sculpture, stylistically advancing beyond Neoclassicism to a reductivesimplicity, forecasting modern minimalism, and psychologically rendering serial states of mind in a project that was novel for the pre-Freudian world.

For decorating the tops of sleeves; worked with black and white cotton and a little dark brown silk, in a conventional design.

Probably the ends of a bride's head-scarf. Bobbin lace made of natural colored linen thread and black silk borders two sides of piece of muslin.

White linen on which a design in drawn-work is worked with yellow, orange, and white cotton.

Probably intended for decorating the tops of sleeves. White cotton embroidered solidly with black silk in a conventional design. Two parallel lines worked with yellow silk run through the design.

Bands of embroidery, probably used to decorate the tops of sleeves.  White cotton worked with red silk in cross-stitch in a geometric design.

1801 / 1825, Slovakia

1801 / 1825, Slovakia