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- Beethoven. Death masks have been made for a number of composer’s -Haydn, Chopin, Mozart, and Liszt amongst them. However, none shows the ravages of time more so than the death mask of Ludwig Van Beethoven.
- John Dillinger. The leader of the Dillinger or Terror Gang, John Dillinger was a notorious 1930’s Chicago gangster. Wanted for 24 bank robberies, he had escaped from jail twice and narrowly avoided a conviction for murder when he shot a Chicago, police officer.
- Ned Kelly. By the eighteen hundreds, death masks were not being created as souvenirs of the rich and famous; they were also being made of criminals. The nineteenth century equivalent of the head on a pike, the publicly displayed death mask was a way of intimidating would be criminals and reinforcing the authority of the law.
- Reinhard Heydrich. Second in the SS only to Heinrich Himmler and one of the architects of the holocaust, Reinhard Heydrich became a martyr of the Third Reich on May 27, 1942, when assassins killed him on the way home from his headquarters in Prague.
Marie Tussaud was a hustler, and did her part, as her contemporary P.T. Barnum did in the U.S., to create what we recognize as the modern concept of celebrity—renown not being something you ...
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Did Tussaud make a death mask?
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When did Madame Tussaud die?
Mar 7, 2023 · Shutterstock. Madame Tussaud was skilled in the art of wax sculpture and probably also pretty skilled in the art of BS. Her memoirs are full of questionable stories — the kind of stuff Bob at the office is always bragging about while everyone at the water cooler clandestinely rolls their eyes. "Yeah," says Bob, "I knew Voltaire.
- King Henry IV of France, Died 1610
- Oliver Cromwell, Died 1658
- Peter The Great, Died 1725
- Jean-Paul Marat, Died 1793
- Napoleon Bonaparte, Died 1821
- Aaron Burr, Died 1836
- William Tecumseh Sherman, Died 1891
- Bonus: L'inconnue de La Seine, Late 19th Century
Most death masks are cast as soon as possible, before decay distorts features and makes applying plaster a slippery proposition. Henry IV, on the other hand, had been dead for nearly 200 years when his mask was made. It was July of 1793 when the National Convention, in anticipation of the first anniversary of the abolition of the monarchy and the c...
When Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, died on September 3, 1658, the trappings of monarchy that he had rejected in life were showered upon him in death. He was given nothing short of a royal funeral, and Thomas Simon, medalist and chief engraver of the Tower Mint, was engaged to take his likenes...
After Peter the Great of Russia died on February 8, 1725, his wife and successor Empress Catherine I ordered court sculptor Carlo Bartolomeo Rastrelli to make a death mask and molds of his hands and feet. Rastrelli carefully measured the late emperor's body so that he could create a wood and wax effigy that would be accurate in every detail. The ef...
Jean-Paul Marat, doctor, journalist, and radical firebrand of the French Revolution, was plagued with a chronic skin disease so severe that by the end of his life he spent most of his time in a bath, warm towels draped over his painful scabs and lesions. That's where he was when Charlotte Corday gained entry on the pretext of having information abo...
The circumstances behind the casting of Napoleon Bonaparte's death mask are murky, to put it mildly. The former emperor died on the remote island of St. Helena on May 5, 1821, with French and English doctors attending him. At first the making of a death mask seemed an impossible task—plaster was hard to come by on St. Helena—but on May 7 a mold was...
Brothers Lorenzo Niles Fowler and Orson Squire Fowler were phrenologists, founders of the American Phrenological Journal, and largely responsible for popularizing phrenology in mid-19th century America. In 1836, when they were just starting out, Lorenzo opened offices in New York, where he performed readings on clients, trained students, and wrote ...
William Tecumseh Sherman, General of the Army, scourge of Georgia and the Carolinas, whose scorched earth campaign through the Deep South crippled the Confederacy's war-making ability, died in New York City on Valentine's Day, 1891. Two days later, famed Beaux Arts sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens arrived at Sherman's home to oversee the casting of ...
Every other death mask in this list was cast from a famous person whose name and face have gone down in history. But L'Inconnue de la Seine (the Unknown of the Seine) doesn't even have a name. It's her face alone that has gone down in history. The story goes that an unknown young woman, purportedly a suicide by drowning, was fished out of the Seine...
Nov 20, 2022 · Behind the glitz and glam of modern-day waxworks of the likes of Donald Trump or Michael Jackson, lies the blood-soaked history of the French Revolution. In fact, the renowned Madam Tussaud franchise has generated a lucrative venture built on the back of beheadings. Born as Marie Grosholtz in 1761, the future Madam Tussaud started out as the ...
Dec 1, 2021 · Tussaud Got Her Start in Death Masks. Kat Eschner Smithsonian Magazine December 1, 2021. Marie Tussaud, born on this day in 1761, became wealthy, famous and successful thanks to her talent for wax sculpting, her business acumen and a new kind of public fascination with bodies and public figures. Today Tussaud is chiefly remembered for launching ...
Aug 28, 2020 · Tussaud made a wax death mask of many famous revolution victims, including Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, Madame Elizabeth, Princess Lamballe, Robespierre, Danton, and Marat.
