Madame Tussauds: 250 years collecting in secret

Fascinating lecture at the Wallace Collection given by Louise Baker, the archivist at Madame Tussauds.

She told us about the history of the museum from its early days in the French Revolution.  I had known it had begun around then but didn’t know the popularity of Dr Curtis’s salons where you could see figures of the famous before the Revolution and then of the roll the collection played. I loved idea of Madame Tussauds modelling the death masks of the aristocrats off their severed heads in her back yard! I also didn’t know how she fled to Britain and toured with the collection for 30 years.

Louise was most interesting when she talked about the objects and clothes the museum had collected over the years. Since Victorian times the idea has been that if you were modelled the museum asked you to donate clothes for the figure and objects associated with you. Despite a fire in the 1920s and being hit by a bomb in the Second World War there is still an extensive collection. They also have letters from various people and all the photographs used when making the models.

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