In 1835 trading as Madame Tussaud & Sons, the wax museum finally found a permanent home in the Baker Street Bazaar. Madame Tussaud kept the show on the road despite setbacks including losing many of her figures when shipwrecked en route to Ireland. She understood the power of publicity and sensation: ruthlessly beheading wax models of the once-famous and replacing them with new people of fascination such as Lord Nelson, Lady Hamilton, King George III and Queen Charlotte. ![]() Barnum, Madame Tussaud was practised in the art of ballyhoo. For the next thirty-three years Madame Tussaud toured the British Isles with her travelling wax museum. A year later Marie married François Tussaud but in 1802 she left him in France and took ship to England. She claims a fellow cell mate was Josephine de Beauharnais, the future consort of the Emperor Napoleon thus posing the question whether Madame Tussaud was being economical with the truth once again. Madame Tussaud’s memoirs relate that in 1794 she was denounced as a royalist and imprisoned in La Force her head shaved in preparation for the guillotine. When the guillotine began its gruesome work Curtius and Marie were employed to model wax death masks of The Terror’s most celebrated victims including the Princess de Lamballe, Madame DuBarry, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Madame Elizabeth, Marat and his assassin Charlotte Corday. On the eve of the French Revolution in 1789, the mob commandeered Curtius’s wax heads of the Duc d’Orléans and finance minister Necker to parade on pikes through Paris. A great self-publicist, Madame Tussaud may have invented this episode in her young life. In her memoirs Madame Tussaud claims that she became an art tutor of Louis XVI’s sister Madame Elizabeth in 1780 and actually lived at Versailles. As well as the great, Curtius also sculpted the infamous who he displayed in La Caverne des Grands Voleurs: the precursor of Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. Marie’s first wax display model was the philosopher Voltaire (1777) and she soon showed an aptitude as great as her mentor for modelling in eerily lifelike flesh tones. In something of a coup, Curtius collaborated with the queen’s dressmaker Rose Bertin who made identical gowns for Marie Antoinette’s effigy. His most popular figures included the new king Louis XVI and his Austrian queen the fashion leader Marie Antoinette. When Louis XV died in 1774, Curtius had already found fame sculpting wax figures of celebrated people of the day. De Conti, a cousin of King Louis XV, invited Curtius to Paris where he set up a salon of wax erotic tableaux on the Rue Saint-Honoré.Ī six-year old Marie would accompany Curtius’s household to Paris and the wax artist became something of a father figure and mentor to the child. ![]() In truth, Curtius’s ‘Anatomical Venuses’ with flip-open navels were considered erotic and earned him the patronage of the Prince de Conti. Strasbourg-born Marie Grosholtz, known to the world as Madame Tussaud (1761-1850), was introduced to the craft of wax model making when her impoverished mother took a position as housekeeper to young Swiss physician Philippe Curtius who earned a reputation for anatomically correct wax miniatures ostensibly made for medical research.
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