Head of Man Expressive of Horror

Victor Joseph Ségoffin's charcoal and chalk study captures an anguished face with mouth agape, rendered through vigorous hatching and tonal contrast. The sketch demonstrates the expressive potential of rapid drawing—a technique central to early comic art. During the 1910s, newspaper cartoonists and illustrators developed a visual shorthand for emotion through exaggerated facial features and gestural mark-making. This study reflects the period's interest in capturing psychological states through distortion and movement, methods that would become foundational to sequential comic strips and their development of character expression across multiple panels.