In this work, we propose a prospective novel method to address illumination invariant system for facial expression recognition. Facial expressions are used to convey nonverbal visual information among humans. This also plays a vital role in human-machine interface modules that have invoked attention of many researchers. Earlier machine learning algorithms require complex feature extraction algorithms and are relying on the size and uniqueness of features related to the subjects. In this paper, a deep convolutional neural network is proposed for facial expression recognition and it is trained on two publicly available datasets such as JAFFE and Yale databases under different illumination conditions. Furthermore, transfer learning is used with pre-trained networks such as AlexNet and ResNet-101 trained on ImageNet database. Experimental results show that the designed network could recognize up to 30% variation in the illumination and it achieves an accuracy of 92%.