Death masks of famous people in history
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