Manasi Bandyopadhyay ( Chakrabarti)
When you are
in London, please don’t forget to visit the Madam Toussauds’ wax Museum .
It was first established
on Baker Street in 1836 by a renowned wax sculptor Marie Tussaud.. This museum
houses more than 250 lifelike wax figures of many important , famous and historic personalities and also popular film
characters.
Marie Tussaud, née Marie Grosholtz, was born in Strasbourg,
France in 1761 . Her first wax sculpture was of Voltaire 1777 .
At the age of 17 she became the art tutor to Madame Elizabeth -- King Louis XVI’s
sister -- at the Palace of Versailles. During the French Revolution she was
imprisoned for three months awaiting execution, but was released after the
intervention of an influential friend. During the Revolution, she modelled many
prominent victims. Other famous people whom she modelled included Jean-Jacques
Rousseau and Benjamin Franklin.
In 1794, she went out from France and spent the next 33 years travelling around
Europe. She married Francois Tussaud in 1795. Due to the Napoleonic Wars, She was unable to return to
France and traveled throughout Great Britain and Ireland exhibiting her
collection. From 1831, she took a series of short leases on the upper floor of Baker
Street Bazaar .
By 1835, Marie Toussauds had settled down in Baker Street,
London and opened a museum. One of the main attractions of her museum was the
Chamber of Horrors. This part of the exhibition included victims of the French
Revolution and newly created figures of murderers and other criminals. Other
famous people were added, including Lord Nelson and Sir Walter Scott.
The gallery originally contained some 400 different figures,
but damage done by fire in 1925 and German bombs in 1941 has rendered most of
these older models defunct. The casts themselves have survived from which the
historical waxworks were remade, and these can be seen in the museum's history
exhibit.
The oldest figure on display is that of Madame du Barry, the
work of Curtius from 1765 and part of the waxworks left to Tussaud at his
death. Other faces from the time of Tussaud include Robespierre and George III.
In 1842, she made a self-portrait which is now on display at the entrance of
her museum. She died in her sleep on 16 April 1850.
As space problem became intense in Baker Street, and side by
side cost was rising, her grandson Joseph Randall transferred the museum at its current
location on Marylebone Road By 1883. The new exhibition galleries were opened
on 14 July 1884.
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