Laurence Hutton

“ He stepped from a humble cradle in an Italian provincial town on to the throne of France; he made his commonplace brothers and sisters and his ignorant henchmen kings and queens of all the European countries within his reach; he locked a pope in a closet, as if he had been a naughty boy; he re-drew the map of half the world; he re-wrote history; his name will live as long as books are read; no man out of so little ever accomplished so much—but yet he was no gentleman!
The Bonaparte mask, in bronze, as here shown is very rare. Only four are known to exist. ”

“ The face below this solitary lock is deeply marked with the furrows left by care’s ploughshare; the fine dark eyes look downward, the mouth is closed with a firmness that says more for his tenacity of will than pages of eulogy would do; but what strikes you more than anything else is the utter lack of expression upon the countenance. ”

“ A student of physiognomy, but not a student of the back numbers of the London Punch, who did not recognize the man in this cast, said of it that it was the head of a man more remarkable for vivacity and quickness of mind than for original and powerful thinking. George Combe, in the winter of 1838-39, exhibited in the United States a mask of Brougham, of course from life, for Brougham did not die 262until thirty years after that—and he was born in 1778—which is perhaps the mask here reproduced, as it is the face of a man in his prime, and his was a marvellous prime—not that of a nonogenarian. ”

“ In the “Guild Hall” of “The City of Lushington,” an ancient and very unique social club, which has met for many years in a dark and dingy little back room connected with the Harp Tavern, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, London, are still preserved the chair of Edmund Kean, the hole in the wall made by the quart pot he threw once, in a fit of gross insubordination, at a former “Lord Mayor,” and what is religiously considered by all the citizens of Lushington to be a death-mask of Kean himself. This cast is covered with glass and with dust and its history is lost in the mists of time. ”

“ Hartley incline to the opinion that the mask of Clay in my collection is a cast from the actual face, and, notwithstanding the fact that the eyelids are open, that it is from life. Lewis Gaylord Clark, writing in 1852 in Harper’s Magazine of Clay’s funeral, said: “His countenance immediately after death looked like an antique cast. His features seemed to be perfectly classical, and the repose of all his muscles gave the lifeless body a quiet majesty seldom reached by living human beings.” ”

“ When Madame Malibran died I was very young, but I remember distinctly hearing my mother told that de Beriot, the husband of her friend, had taken her mask, and that it had helped him to execute the crowned bust of the great singer which now decorates the private cabinet of her son. His bust, nevertheless, is not a good likeness, nor is it agreeable. But it 54is a touching proof of the love of the widower. Is it not wonderful that simply by the force of this love a musician should have been transformed into a sculptor? ”

“ Wilde compared this cast of Swift’s face, taken immediately after death, with the cast and drawings of his skull made in 1835, ninety years later, when the bodies of Swift and Stella were exhumed, and their craniums examined by the phrenologists belonging to the British Association; and by careful analysis of both, he was able to satisfy himself that Swift was not “a driveller and a show” when he died, nor a madman while he lived. He gave, upon the sixty-second page of his book, a drawing of this mask in profile, and the face is certainly identical with the face in my collection. ”

“ Lavater, in his Physiognomy, says that “the dead, and the impressions of the dead, taken in plaster, are not less worthy of observation [than the living faces] . The settled features are much more prominent than in the living and in the sleeping. What life makes fugitive, death arrests. What was undefinable is defined. All is reduced to its proper level; each trait is in its true proportion, unless excruciating disease or accident have preceded death.” ”

“ Among the English-speaking actors of later days few have been better known and better liked, in America at all events, than John McCullough, Dion Boucicault, Lawrence Barrett, Henry Edwards, and Edwin Booth, the faces of all of whom I am able to present here. John McCullough, the first of this galaxy of stars to quit the stage of life, was a man of strong and attractive personality, if not a great actor ”

“ Over the high arched forehead—surely the forehead of a poet—there hangs from the crown of the head a single curl of dark hair, a curl which you cannot look at without feeling a touch of pathos in your inmost heart, for it is the only thing about the worn and silent man reminding you of the brilliant youth of Vivian Grey. ”

“ He died calmly and without pain; and the cast of his face certainly reflects much that Willis had drawn in his Pencillings by the Way.
Sheridan said once of a fellow-Irishman that Burke’s “abilities, happily for the glory of our age, are not intrusted to the perishable eloquence of the day, but will live to be the admiration of that hour when all of us shall be mute, and most of us forgotten.” Burke, in all his relations, was a better man than Sheridan, and he met, as he deserved, a better fate. ”

“ A scarce contemporary French engraving, entitled “Henri IV. Exhumé,” represents the king as standing upright in an open coffin, against one of the great stone pillars in the vaults of St. Denis. The body is wrapped in strips of cloth, like an Egyptian mummy, but the head and shoulders are entirely exposed. A long inscription, at the bottom of the print, explains that “on this occasion a plaster cast was taken of the face—on a moulé sur la nature même le plâtre—from which to-day artists make their portraits of the great sovereign. ”

“ And at the age of eighty-two he himself wrote to an old friend: “I am alive, though turned of eighty; still in good health and spirits; codifying like a dragon.” “Candor in the countenance, mildness in the looks, serenity upon the brow, calmness in the language, coolness in the movements, imperturbability united with the keenest feeling:” such, according to Brissot de Warville, were the characteristics of Bentham. ”

“ Lavater wrote with unbounded enthusiasm of the impression made upon him by the face of Frederick the Great, whom he once saw in life. “Of all the physiognomies I have ever examined,” he said, “there is not a single one which bears so strongly as this does the impress of its high destiny. The forehead, which forms almost a straight and continued line with the nose, announces impatience against the human race, and communicates the expression of it to the cheeks and lips,” etc. ”

“ Sir Henry Taylor in his Autobiography, spoke, shortly after the poet’s death, of “a cast taken of a mask of Wordsworth.” He considered it admirable as a likeness, and added that it was so regarded by Mrs. Wordsworth. He saw “a rough grandeur in it, with which, if it was to be converted into marble, posterity might be contented.” But he does not say whether it 105was a life-mask or a death-mask, and he does not refer to the Haydon mask as such. In no other work, in no biography of Wordsworth, and in no account of his last hours, is any allusion to the mask to be found. ”

“ W. W. Story, in writing of the life-mask of Washington, says of life-masks generally: “Indeed a mask from the living face, though it repeats exactly the true forms of the original, lacks the spirit and expression of the real person. But this is not always the case. The more mobile and variable the face, the more the mask loses; the more set and determined the character and expression, the more perfectly the work reproduces it.”
xvThe procedure of taking a mould of the living face is not pleasant to the subject. ”

“ Hardly one per centum of the hundreds of biographers whose works I have consulted ever refer to the taking of a mask in life, or after death, and there is absolutely no literature which is devoted to the subject. The cast of Sheridan’s hand is often alluded to, the mask of his dead face is nowhere mentioned ”

“ Henry Edwards was not only an actor but a man of science. He was recognized as a distinguished entomologist by many persons on both sides of the Atlantic who had never even heard of his theatrical career. He left a magnificent collection of butterflies, now preserved in one of the leading museums of America, and he contributed to the press of both countries a number of valuable books and pamphlets upon the subject he loved. His work upon the stage was uniformly good. As Mr. Winter said of him, in a funeral oration, he did not astonish and dazzle ”

“ His body was clad in an antique toga, kindled tapers lighted his way, and his pallid brow was at last encircled by the wreath of laurel he had waited for so long. And thus at the end of the Nineteenth Century do we, in the New World, look upon the cast of the actual face of the great poet of the Old World who died at the end of the century he adorned. The original mask is preserved, with other personal relics of Tasso, in the room 10of the convent of San Onofrio, in which he died. ”

“ Wilde said: “The original mask remained in the museum T.C.D. [Trinity College, Dublin] till within a few years ago [1849] , when it was accidentally destroyed.” The history of this replica—for replica it certainly is—before it came into my hands I have never been able to trace. It found its way into the shop of a dealer in curiosities, who knew nothing of its pedigree, not even whose face it was; and from him I bought it for a few shillings. It is one of the most interesting of the collection, and perhaps the most valuable, because the most rare. ”

“ The ancient Romans are said to have made, in wax, casts of the faces of their illustrious dead. These masks are believed to have been colored to represent the originals as they appeared in life, to have been cherished religiously by their descendants through many generations, and, on the occasion of a public and formal funeral, it is thought that they were sometimes worn by professional mourners, as a sort of posthumous tribute from the dead already to the memory of the latest man who had died. ”

“ The cast of his head has been compared carefully with all the existing portraits; it has been examined by experts in portraiture; phrenologists have described the character of the man most accurately, from its bumps and its physiognomy; it was certainly made from nature; it is too like Sheridan to have been made from the nature of any other man; and yet there is no record of its having been made. No surviving member of the family of Coleridge had ever heard of the existence of his death-mask until my copy was discovered, but they all accept it as genuine ”

“ Henry Christy is known to have been in Stockholm at the time of the sale of the effects of Baestrom, the Swedish sculptor, and he is believed to have purchased it then and there. It contains more of the top and back of the head than the cast here reproduced, and it bears, very unmistakably, evidences of the bullet wounds in the temples. This cast, the wax mask of Cromwell mentioned above, and a cast of the face of James II. of England, are the only things of the kind the British Museum possesses. ”

“ And recent explorers have satisfied themselves that in the early burials of many nations it was the custom to cover the heads and bodies of the dead with sheets of gold so pliable that they took the impress of the form; and not infrequently, when in the course of centuries the embalmed flesh had shrivelled or fallen away, the gold retained the exact cast of the features. ”

“ There exist at Abbotsford two masks of its first laird—a life-mask and a death-mask. Of the former very little is known except that it is said to have been made in Paris. The latter was exhibited at the Scott Centenary Celebration in Edinburgh, in 1871, when it attracted a great deal of attention. They both show, as no portrait of the living man shows, except the familiar sketch by Maclise in the Fraser Gallery, the peculiar formation of his head, and the unusual length above the eyes. ”

“ The present cast is believed by experts to have been taken from life, and at about the time of her retirement. It shows, in a marked degree, the peculiar thickness of the underlip remembered by persons still living who remember Mrs. Siddons, and noticeable in the portraits of all the Kembles of her generation, particularly in those of the great actress herself. The cast resembles strongly an unfinished sketch of her in the South Kensington Museum, made in her old age by an unknown artist, and it is not unlike the bust she made of herself, now in the Dyce Library in the same institution. ”

“ His mask, after death, was made by Thomas Ball and Joel T. Hart. Dr. Samuel Osgood said of Powers in 1870: “In his looks, his ideas, as well as in all his works, he is a man of the golden mean. There is nothing too much in his make or his manner. He is a good specimen of a well-formed man, and his own statue would make a good sign for the front of his studio.” In October, 1847, Mrs. Browning wrote: “Mr. Powers, the sculptor, is our chief friend and favorite. A most charming, simple, straightforward, genial American—as simple as the man of genius he has proved himself to be.... ”