The story of the beginning of my collection of masks is curious and perhaps interesting. The half-dozen casts upon which it is based were found, early in the Sixties, in a dust-bin in one of the old-fashioned streets which run towards the East River, in the neighborhood of Tompkins Square, New York. Their owner had lately died; his unsympathetic and unappreciative heirs had thrown away what they considered “the horrible things;” a small boy had found them, and offered them for sale to a dealer in phrenological casts, who realized their worth, although, in many cases, he did not know whose heads they represented; and so, by chance, they came into my possession, and inspired the search for more.

The history of these masks which formed the nucleus of the collection, or the history of the original collector himself, I have never been able to discover. They are, however, the casts most frequently described in the printed lectures of George Combe, who came to America in the winter of 1838-39, and the inference is that they were left here by him in the hands of one of his disciples.

The earliest masks in the collection to-day are replicas of those of Dante, made, perhaps, in the first part of the fourteenth century, and of Tasso, certainly made at the end of the sixteenth. The latest mask is that of Edwin Booth, who died only a few months ago. They range from Sir Isaac Newton, the wisest of men, to Sambo, the lowest type of the American negro; from Oliver Cromwell to Henry Clay; from Bonaparte to Grant; from Keats to Leopardi; from Pius IX. to Thomas Paine; from Ben Caunt, the prize-fighter, to Thomas Chalmers, the light of the Scottish pulpit.

So far as I have been able to discover, mine is the most nearly complete and the largest collection of its kind in the world. I have, indeed, found nothing anywhere to compare with it. Usually, the Phrenological Museums contain casts of idiots, criminals, and monstrosities, and these are seemingly gathered together to illustrate what man’s cranial structure ought not to be. There are but three or four casts of the faces of distinguished persons in the British Museum, and about as many in the National Portrait Gallery in London; and all of these I am able to present here, with the exception of that of James II., who belongs, perhaps, to the criminal class. In the Hohenzollern Museum are many casts, but these generally are those of civic or national celebrities—Berlin aldermen or German warriors, in whom the world at large has but little interest. The casts of Frederick the Great, Queen Louise, Schiller, and one or two more in that institution, however, I was permitted to have reproduced. The others I have gathered after many years of patient and pleasant research in the studios, the curiosity-shops, and the plaster-shops of most of the capitals of Europe and America. The story of this research, with an account of the means taken to identify the masks when they were discovered, could itself make a book of this size. I am sure that mine is the actual death-mask of Aaron Burr, for instance, because I have the personal guarantee of the man who made the mould in 1836; I am positive of the identity of another cast, because I saw it made myself; and concerning still another, I have no question, because I know the man who stole it! In the matter of the great majority of the masks, however, the difficulties were very great. Hardly one per centum of the hundreds of biographers whose works I have consulted ever refer to the taking of a mask in life, or after death, and there is absolutely no literature which is devoted to the subject. The cast of Sheridan’s hand is often alluded to, the mask of his dead face is nowhere mentioned; and yet there appears to be no doubt that both were taken. The cast of his head has been compared carefully with all the existing portraits; it has been examined by experts in portraiture; phrenologists have described the character of the man most accurately, from its bumps and its physiognomy; it was certainly made from nature; it is too like Sheridan to have been made from the nature of any other man; and yet there is no record of its having been made. No surviving member of the family of Coleridge had ever heard of the existence of his death-mask until my copy was discovered, but they all accept it as genuine; and I recognized Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge once, in the corridor of a London club, by his wonderful resemblance in features, and in the shape of his head, to the mask of his grandfather. The mask of Dean Swift which I possess is exactly like the long-lost cast as it is engraved in Dr. Wilde’s book. The mask of Charles XII. shows distinctly the marks of the bullet in the temple; and I have succeeded in tracing the other casts in many and very different ways.

I may mention here that some of these masks, as you now see them, were broken in the Custom-house in New York, and that the mask of Elihu Burritt was demolished entirely and without hope of restoration. Upon these, notwithstanding their condition, and upon all the imported masks, I paid a duty of fifty-five per centum, upon a valuation assessed usually at twenty-five per centum above what I swore was their value in Europe; the Custom-house charges of various kinds being, in many instances, larger than the original cost of the casts themselves. So far as I can understand, I was taxed in this matter in order to protect the ghosts of the plasterers of America, who could not have made these casts even if they had so wished!

The value of a plaster cast as a portrait of the dead or living face cannot for a moment be questioned. It must, of necessity, be absolutely true to nature. It cannot flatter; it cannot caricature. It shows the subject as he was, not only as others saw him, in the actual flesh, but as he saw himself. And in the case of the death-mask particularly, it shows the subject often as he permitted no one but himself to see himself. He does not pose; he does not “try to look pleasant.” In his mask he is seen, as it were, with his mask off!

Lavater, in his Physiognomy, says that “the dead, and the impressions of the dead, taken in plaster, are not less worthy of observation [than the living faces]. The settled features are much more prominent than in the living and in the sleeping. What life makes fugitive, death arrests. What was undefinable is defined. All is reduced to its proper level; each trait is in its true proportion, unless excruciating disease or accident have preceded death.” And Mr. W. W. Story, in writing of the life-mask of Washington, says of life-masks generally: “Indeed a mask from the living face, though it repeats exactly the true forms of the original, lacks the spirit and expression of the real person. But this is not always the case. The more mobile and variable the face, the more the mask loses; the more set and determined the character and expression, the more perfectly the work reproduces it.”

The procedure of taking a mould of the living face is not pleasant to the subject. In order to prevent the adhesion of the plaster, a strong lather of soap and water, or more frequently a small quantity of oil, is applied to the hair and to the beard. This will explain the flat and unnatural appearance of the familiar mustache and imperial in the cast of Napoleon III. In some instances, as in that of Keats, a napkin is placed over the hair. The face is then moistened with sweet-oil; quills are inserted into the nostrils in order that the victim may breathe during the operation, or else openings are left in the plaster for that purpose. A description of the taking of the mould of the face of a Mr. A—— (condensed from a copy of the Phrenological Journal, published in Edinburgh in January, 1845), will give the uninitiated some idea of the process: “The person was made to recline on his back at an angle of about thirty-five degrees, and upon a seat ingeniously adapted to the purpose. The hair and the face being anointed with a little pure scented oil, the plaster was laid carefully upon the nose, mouth, eyes, and forehead, in such a way as to avoid disturbing the features; and this being set, the back of the head was pressed into a flat dish containing plaster, where it continued to recline, as on a pillow. The plaster was then applied to the parts of the head still uncovered, and soon afterwards the mould was hard enough to be removed in three pieces, one of which, covering the occiput, was bounded anteriorly by a vertical section immediately behind the ears, and the other two, which covered the rest of the head, were divided from each other by pulling up a strong silken thread previously so disposed upon the face on one side of the nose.” The account closes with the statement that “Mr. A—— declared that he had been as comfortable as possible all the time”!

Since these papers originally appeared in Harper’s Magazine in the autumn of 1892, they have been revised, enlarged, and virtually rewritten. Eighteen new masks are here presented, and I have added many pages to the descriptive text.

The subject-matter of the volume may not be considered very cheerful reading, but I feel that to those to whom the work appeals at all it will appeal strongly as an unique portrait gallery of men and women of all countries and of many ages, distinguished in many walks of life. I trust that it will lend itself particularly to extra-illustration. And to all those who make human portraiture a study, or a hobby, it is cordially inscribed.

New York, January 1, 1894.