Madame Tussaud, (full name Anna Maria “Marie” Tussaud), who passed away on 16 April 1889, aged 88, in London, was the French-born sculptor and founder of Madame Tussaud’s museum of wax figures, in central London.
Her early
life was spent first in Bern and then in Paris, where she learned the art of
wax modelling from Philippe Curtius, whose two celebrated wax museums she
inherited upon his death in 1794. From 1780 until the outbreak of the French
Revolution in 1789, she served as art tutor at Versailles to Louis XVI’S
sister, Madame Élisabeth, and she was
later imprisoned as a royalist. According to her memoirs, during the Reign
of Terror she had the gruesome responsibility of making death masks from
heads—frequently those of her friends—freshly severed by the guillotine.
Her
marriage in 1795 to François Tussaud, an engineer from Mâcon, was not a
success; and in 1802 she took her two sons and her collection of wax models
to England. She toured the British Isles for 33 years before finally
establishing a permanent home in Baker Street, London, where she worked until
eight years before her death. (In 1884 Madame Tussaud’s moved to the Marylebone
Road, London.)
Madame
Tussaud’s museum is topical as well as historical and includes both the famous
and the infamous. Notorious characters and the relics of famous
crimes are segregated in the “Chamber of Horrors,” a name coined jokingly by a
contributor to Punch in 1845. Many of the original models made
by Marie Tussaud of her great contemporaries, including Voltaire, Benjamin
Franklin, Horatio Nelson, and Sir Walter Scott, are still preserved.
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