You Are What You Sell: The Original 'Job-Core' Portraits

Long before “dress for the job you want,” someone in London was like: what if you literally became your job?

Illustration of four anthropomorphic figures representing different professions: a fruit seller with fruits, a tailor with sewing tools, an armorer with armor, and a fisherman with fishing gear. Each figure is labeled in French.

Around 1800, publisher Samuel William Fores released a cheeky series of aquatints called Hieroglyphics that turn tradespeople into portraits built entirely from their tools and wares.

A blacksmith becomes an anvil + bellows + hammer. A fruiterer is basically baskets and produce wearing a face. It’s equal parts charming and mildly cursed, in the best way.

Illustration depicting four craftspeople: a hatter with a top hat, a cooper with barrels, a blacksmith with tools and an anvil, and a joiner with a woodworking toolset.

This kind of composite portrait has a lineage. The “faces made of stuff” idea is usually traced back to Giuseppe Arcimboldo in the 16th century, who stacked fruits, animals, and objects into human heads like a Renaissance collage master.

An artistic depiction contrasting a musician and a barber, with various musical instruments and barber tools creatively arranged to form their profiles.

But the title is where it gets extra fun. The Public Domain Review points out that calling the series Hieroglyphics makes a lot of sense for the moment: if the prints really date to around 1800, they arrive right after the Rosetta Stone’s 1799 rediscovery, when “symbols that stand in for language” were very much having a cultural moment.

Four artistic profiles illustrating different professions: a florist with floral decorations, a writer with writing tools, a musician surrounded by instruments, and a barber with hairdressing accessories.

Today we think of hieroglyphs as ancient Egyptian writing, but the joke here is broader: anything can be translated into signs. Even a face. Even a whole person.

If you want to see the originals in the wild, the prints are held by London’s Wellcome Collection (and the series is indexed and viewable via public-domain archives).