Lincoln and Washington
 
Back in the old days, if you did something as worthy of note as supply the basis for a Roger Daltrey/Ken Russell collaboration (also a hit by the band Phoenix), invent the Panopticon, or write Tristram Shandy, you can bet that someone was going to violate your still-fresh corpse by taking a mold of your face in repose, so that future generations (that’s us) could gawk and say “Looked like a bit of a pillock.”

These images come from the Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks, located at the Manuscripts Division of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Anyone surprise you? The most interesting are probably the masks of Lincoln and Whitman. I think George Washington’s mask absolutely matches his depictions in paintings and currency. Goethe’s would make the best gargoyle.
 

Elizabeth I, d. 1603
 

Oliver Cromwell, d. 1658
 

Isaac Newton, d. 1727
 

Jonathan Swift, d. 1745
 

Laurence Sterne, d. 1768
 

Benjamin Franklin, d. 1790
 

Edmund Burke, d. 1797
 

George Washington, d. 1799
 

Thomas Paine, d. 1809
 

John Keats, d. 1821
 

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, d. 1832
 

Jeremy Bentham, d. 1832
 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, d. 1834
 

Aaron Burr, d. 1836
 

Abraham Lincoln, d. 1865
 

Robert E. Lee, d. 1870
 

Ulysses S. Grant, d. 1885
 

Franz Liszt, d. 1886
 

Walt Whitman, d. 1892
 

Leo Tolstoy, d. 1910