The Head of Thirty-Five Faculties

A Japanese phrenology chart, 1888.

Work: woodcut
Maker: after Mihara Muneaki
Date: 1888
Held by: Published Japan, 1888 · Wellcome Collection

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

A woodcut published in Japan in the twenty-first year of Meiji, 1888, after Mihara Muneaki. A large head in profile is divided into thirty-five cells, each crowded with text naming a human faculty, grouped into deliberation, comprehension, opinion and taste. The Wellcome Collection traces the scheme to the phrenology of Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim and the charts of their followers, carried to Japan in the decades of rapid Western borrowing. Black ink on cream, dense as a map.

See it on your wall

The plate, in the room it was made for

The Head of Thirty-Five Faculties, printed large and framed — in the consulting room, the study, the library. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

The Head of Thirty-Five Faculties framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A reproduction of woodcut — after Mihara Muneaki, 1888 — from the copy held by Published Japan, 1888 · Wellcome Collection. The source. The work is centuries out of copyright and in the public domain.
Printed faithful to that source scan. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the plate you receive is the plate as it survives.
Printed to order on EMA matte art paper, 200gsm. Framed editions sit in a box frame under acrylic, with no mount.
Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the engraver’s, not ours.
Ships in 5–10 business days.
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our plates cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the engraver’s hand is visible — the linework, the tonal work, the lettering — on a matte sheet that shows every line without glare.

From the same atlas