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Brian Joseph Davis uses police identikit software to create sketches of famous literary characters. It’s creepy…

Do you recognise the man pictured above? You won’t have seen him before, other than in your mind’s eye, or possibly your nightmares. According to artist and blogger Brian Joseph Davis, this is what Humbert Humbert, the perverted anti-hero of Lolita ‘looks like’. Davis uses police composite sketch software – the contemporary manifestation of the identikit – to illustrate literary characters, feeding in descriptions from the original text. Humbert is created from this passage of Nabakov…

Gloomy good looks…Clean-cut jaw, muscular hand, deep sonorous voice…broad shoulder…I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow-moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sullen and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case…But instead I am lanky, big-boned, wooly-chested Humbert Humbert, with thick black eyebrows…A cesspoolful of rotting monsters behind his slow boyish smile…aging ape eyes…Humbert’s face might twitch with neuralgia.

Below are some more examples, and you can see The Composites blog here and read an article about the project in The Atlantic here.

Emma Bovary

She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age…Her eyelids seemed chiseled expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down.
Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary

Ignatius J. Reilly

A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress.
John Kennedy Toole – A Confederacy of Dunces