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There's no art
To find the mind's construction in the face.
During the afternoon of September 13, 1908 Freud visited the National Portrait Gallery in London and jotted down one and a half sides of unsystematic observations which he entitled Notes on Faces and Men. These notes have been published and discussed elsewhere (Molnar, 1998, pp. 41-2; Tögel, 2002, pp. 250-255). My intention here is to investigate their origin and context.
For good reason it is the first line of the notes that has attracted most attention:
Shakespeare looks completely exceptional, completely unenglish Jacques-Pierre (Molnar, 1998, p. 41).
This is the earliest hint of Freud's uncertainty about the authorship of Shakespeare, long before the 1920s and 30s when that theme would develop into something of an obsession. Though my interest here is not in following that development forward, but in looking backwards or sideways at its repercussions in terms of Freud's life at that period, that future inevitably casts its shadow over this account.
The notes on the portraits were written on a single sheet of the large, approximately foolscap size paper that Freud favored. Since the sheet was not folded, he probably wrote them up later that day, perhaps that evening back in his room at Ford's Hotel