The life of Anna Maria Grosholtz Tussaud (1761-1850) reads like an incredible novel. The woman who essentially invented the modern traveling exhibition was also witness to the passage of France from the high flown, party-life of the Ancien Regime to the Terror of the Revolution, from the Napoleonic wars to the glitter and bourgeois consumer paradise of Victorian Britain- what a life! Madame Tussaud wasn't only a brilliant artist she was an ingenious business woman and creative entrepreneur.
Some of the very people she was asked to immortalize in wax were those she had been friends with before the Revolution and who had died during the Terror. Bringing their severed heads to her workshop she had to work quickly to create wax replicas of their famous faces before decay set in.
A new book about it all (written with the impeccable care of a great historian and the aplomb of a popular novelist) is Kate Berridge's bio Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax. I read it over the winter break and couldn't put it down.
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