Young Man with a Candle, from Life-Sized Heads

Features gone ashen and eyes bulging, Thomas Frye’s anonymous figure brandishes a candlestick. The embodiment of Romantic terror, he may very well have seen a ghost or encountered other scientifically inexplicable horrors. Backed against an unforgiving and ancient stone wall, he suggests a tragic hero like the one in the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s soon-to-be published Castle of Otranto. Joseph Wright of Derby copied some of Frye’s heads for his Experiment with the Air Pump; this frightened youth could have inspired the wild-haired philosopher at center stage.