We are familiar with Madame Tussaud's famous, almost-200-year-old wax museum, but who was she, and how did she become a renowned "exhibitionist?" Hard work and talent, for sure, but Marie Grosholtz was also in the right place at the right time to capitalize on the public's fascination with celebrities -beginning with a morbid fascination for dead celebrities. Born in Strasbourg, France, in 1761, Grosholtz's mother worked for an anatomist who sculpted in wax. Young Marie learned his art at the time the French Revolution provided plenty of celebrity executions. The public was keen to see those celebrities, and sculptures made from their actual death masks was the key to authenticity.
The work required equal comfort in palaces and in prisons, and a certain ease with the grotesque: in her memoirs, Tussaud claimed that she sat “on the steps of the exhibition, with the bloody heads on her knees, taking the impressions of their features.”
Success in waxworks involved not only artistic skill and patience, but an ear to the ground and fast feet: when Charlotte Corday murdered the radical Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub, Marie got to the scene so fast, the killer was still being processed by law enforcement as she started work on Marat’s death mask.
Madame Tussaud eventually moved to England and opened her museum. You can read her story at Atlas Obscura.
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