Sir Isaac Brock and Christian Corbet Revisited

The April 18th Portrait entry, had a newspaper article on sculptor Christian Corbet's effort to create a realistic bust of Sir Isaac Brock. (please click here)

The job's done and the above is as accurate a representation of Brock that Corbet was able to create.
Corbet used his past experience of recreating a  facial reconstruction of an Egyptian mummy.

"We learned about Brock in school in passing with respect to obviously the historical significance of the War of 1812, but not a great deal," he said.
His work to create a forensic facial reconstruction involved using Brock's own hat and coatee, a close-fitting coat with short skirts or tails, a camera obscura and a pastel portrait of Gen Brock.
The portrait shows Gen Brock in the uniform of an officer in the British Army in Canada and was created using a camera obscura, a box containing a lens.

Mr Corbet said his links to Guernsey made the project more personal
They were used by artists to project images on to their paper or canvas and later, with the addition of a light sensitive plate, became a basic camera.
Using a camera obscura from 1810, Mr Corbet realised the artist and Brock were on different levels so the silhouette on which the miniature painting was based was slightly off.
He said: "His face was a little bit more elongated, a little bit thinner than it would have been."
Using his knowledge of European caucasian male craniums of the time period he built a skull, added tissue markers and then musculature to come up with "a new face for Sir Isaac Brock".

source: BBC News online
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