NOEL42 is made from plaster and the object itself is hollow which is typical of head casts, due to the way in which they are made. Unusually, the cast of the head does not include the bottom jaw of the subject, and this is not through damage of the object; the bottom jaw was never included. Instead of a neck, the cast has been narrowed at the base of the cheek bones and under the nose and cut inwards to form the top of the stand on which it sits. The stand has been made as part of the cast and is cuboidal. The number “42.” has been etched into the stand at the top of the front face.

The eyes of Kretschmar are shut and the cast shows no hair apart from the eyebrows. While the left eyelid is fairly smooth, the right has a few creases and there is a pronounced fold under the right eye. The nose is fairy prominent, though this feature is perhaps exacerbated by the cut off underneath it leading into the stand. Interestingly the right ear and right temple appear deformed - the shape of the skull is concave and the ear appears underdeveloped. Despite this apparent deformation, the area of the skull that Noël was interested in was the forehead.

Overall NOEL42 is in good condition considering its age and the material from which it is made. When the Noël Collection was ‘rediscovered’ in the 1990s all of the casts in the collection were conserved by cleaning them as far as the plaster would allow without causing damage.

The history of NOEL42 and the rest of the Noël Collection is fairly well known until their donation to UCL in 1911.

NOEL42 is the death mask of a man named Kretschmar who died in prison in Saxony, Germany. Noël heard of Kretschmar in 1934 and, being interested in phrenolgy, visited him a a number of times while he was in prison. In his book Noël describes the unique shape of Kretschmar's head: “I have never seen a forehead shelving off from the centre laterally in so remarkable a manner as this does. In its formation is resembles somewhat the bow of a ship.” Noël believed that this feature of Kretschmar's forehead could provide an explanation to his criminal behaviour, and so upon the death of Kretschmar in 1842, Noël made a death mask of his head and performed a dissection of his skull.

As phrenology fell out of fashion and was discredited as a pseudo-science, Noël donated NOEL42 and the rest of his collection to his cousin, Ralph King-Milbanke the second Earl of Lovelace, during the latter half of the 19th century. After the death of King-Milbanke, his wife, Mary Caroline, gave the collection to UCL in 1911. The Noël Collection was incorporated as part of the Galton Collection, though between its donation to UCL and its rediscovery in the 1990s, little is known of what became of the plaster heads.

It seems that at some point during the 20th century the Noël Collection was transferred to the Slade School of Fine Art. At the Slade they were stored openly on a shelf, probably used for teaching of cast making and face drawing. It is thought that during this time many of the heads that are now missing from the original collection were lost; possibly through theft or breakage, though it is equally likely that the whole of the original collection was never donated to UCL. 

During the 1990s the Slade discarded much of its materials, including the 35 heads that make up the Noël Collection today. Saved from a skip, the plaster heads were made part of the UCL Museum Collections and cleaned to a condition as close to that of their original one.