Laurence Hutton (1834–1904) was an American author, critic, and editor who later became a lecturer in English literature at Princeton. Today he is best remembered for leaving the University a remarkable collection of life and death masks that he spent many years accumulating and researching. This body of casts reveals a vital element of Hutton's collecting praxis: his belief that death was a critical (perhaps even the critical) component of enduring celebrity. Death masks – a wax or plaster cast taken posthumously from a person's face – were executed for a number of reasons: scientific, artistic, or intensely personal. In all cases, though, there was a desire to preserve a hypothetically objective likeness of an important person, marking a shift between the perceived binary of life and death. While the death mask facilitated a sense of proximity to the celebrity body, Hutton was driven to flesh these faces out with an array of ephemera, including portraits, autographs, photographs of graves, strands of hair, and even casts of their hands. For Hutton, this triangulation figured as an attempt to capture a physical closeness to the bodies of departed celebrities, an urge he articulated explicitly in his unpublished writings. This article offers a new lens through which to consider celebrity mementoes – as relics in which the ‘imprint’ of the individual is sought and as icons through which we attempt to materialise celebrity.
When we consider the preservation of the animal body in natural history displays, we primarily think of techniques such as taxidermy or the mounting of a skeletal anatomy. Animal death masks are, by contrast, almost completely unstudied. Although casting has been predominantly understood as a technique for preserving the human face, non-humans have also had their faces captured by the casting of a death mask, and the resultant plaster used for a variety of purposes, from the creation of an accurate taxidermy mount, to featuring as a display object in its own right. ‘Animal Death Masks’ examines three case studies in which death masks play an integral role, all of which feature male gorillas kept in city zoos who grew to be local celebrities and were preserved for display in their regional museum, and each of whom had a cast taken of their face after death. This article argues that animal death masks materialize the distorted boundaries present in museum primate narratives: between indexical representations and artistic portraits, endangered animals and celebrity, conservation and preservation.
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