Franz Xaver Messerschmidt

He makes me feel tense just looking at him.

He was made by German sculptor Franz Giava Messerschmidt in the 1770s and 80s.

Messerschmidt never gave him an official name.

Now, everyone just calls him the vexed man.

It was also a time of social and political revolution.

In what is now called the United States, Thomas Jefferson and his friends wrote the Declaration of Independence based on the bold new idea that people should have rights just for being people.

My creator was Franz Schiava Messerschmitt, a German sculptor working in Austria, a country right next to Germany.

Messerschmitt was interested in the idea of looking at a person's expression to understand something true about their inner life, their feelings, their character.