Portraits in Plaster, from the Collection of Laurence Hutton

Chapter II: Part 2

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Mr. Philip Hale, in _Famous Composers and their Works_, says: “The dimensions of the forehead were extraordinary; in height the forehead came next to that of Napoleon, and in breadth it surpassed it. His face was strong and sombre, and while it was not without ugliness it was expressive. The head was built stoutly throughout. The nose was thick, the jaw was broad, the mouth was firm and with protruding lips; the teeth were white, well-shaped, and sound, and when he laughed he showed them freely; the square chin rested on a white cravat. The greater number of pictures of Beethoven are idealized.”

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Beethoven’s left ear-shell, it is said, is preserved in the cabinet of curiosities of a musical family in England. The mask of his face is one of the few casts of notable men to be found in the Museum of the British Phrenological Association in Ludgate Circus, London. It reposes, in plaster, in that institution, by the side of the cast of the head of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

Two masks of Beethoven are in existence. The first was taken from life by Franz Klein in 1812, when the subject was in his forty-second year. Mr. Hale considers this “and the bust made after it by the same artist as of the first importance in forming a correct judgment of the value of all the portraits of Beethoven.” The second mask was made by Dannhauser, on March 28, 1827, two days after Beethoven died. Both casts are here reproduced.

Beethoven was fond of telling the following story about himself. It will give a very fair idea of what he considered to be the size of his own cranium. Meeting the entire Imperial Family of Austria, on one occasion, at Töplitz, in the summer of 1812, “I pressed my hat down on my head,” he said, “buttoned up my great-coat, and walked with folded arms through the thickest of the throng; princes and pages formed a line—the Archduke Rudolph took off his hat, and the Emperor made the first salutation. Those gentry know me!”

It is hardly to be wondered at that Goethe, who was his companion, should have been made very uncomfortable by the display of what looks like a piece of impertinence, even to republican eyes, and even at the end of three-quarters of a century of enlightenment. It is pleasant to read that royalty itself was highly amused by the whole performance.

Perhaps the best pen-picture of Mendelssohn in existence is that taken by Bayard Taylor, who wrote that “his eyes were dark, lustrous, and unfathomable. They were black, but without the usual opaqueness of black eyes; shining, not with a surface light, but with a pure serene planetary flame. His brow, white and unwrinkled, was high and nobly arched, with great breadth at the temples, and strongly resembling that of Poe. His nose had the Jewish prominence, without its usual coarseness; I remember particularly that the nostrils were as finely cut and as flexible as an Arab’s. The lips were thin and rather long, but with an expression of undescribable sweetness in their delicate curves. His face was a long oval in form, and the complexion pale, but not pallid. As I looked upon him I said to myself—‘The Prophet David!’”

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Lampadius, in his _Life of Mendelssohn_, said of the composer’s death: “His features soon assumed an almost glorified expression. So much he looked like one in sleep that some of his friends thought that it could not be death, an illusion which is often given to the eye of love. His friends Bendemann and Hübner took a cast of his features as he lay.”

A clever Frenchman said not long since, in the Paris _Gaulois_, that the Pantheon is nothing but a Grand Hotel, in which the distinguished guests find a temporary lodging-place, and then, like other transients, give up their rooms to somebody else. Mirabeau, Marat, Rousseau, and Voltaire boarded there for a time, and then surrendered their apartments, which are now occupied by Victor Hugo and a few men of no literary, artistic, or political importance; all of whom will, no doubt, in their turn, and before many years, be forced to find some second-class _pension_, where the rates are lower and the service is bad.

It was discovered lately that Mirabeau had again changed his quarters, and that his present address cannot be ascertained. He was carried in great pomp, and with many porters and in many ’busses, to the Pantheon, in 1791; but with Marat he was “de-Pantheonized by order of the National Convention” a year or two later. Marat’s body was thrown into a common sewer in the Rue Montmartre; that of Mirabeau was placed, with no pomp whatever, in the cemetery of Saint-Marcel, the criminals’ burying-ground, where, now that it is wanted once more—this time for honorable disposal—it cannot be found. Mirabeau’s is the face of a man perfectly satisfied with his own achievements and with his own personal appearance. He believed, and he was courageous enough to say, that pure physical beauty in man could only exist in a face which was pitted with small-pox, his own being so marked! And he looks here as if his last thought in life had been one of profound admiration for himself. An eye-witness of his funeral said to one of his biographers that, “except a single trace of physical suffering, one perceived with emotion the most noble calm and the sweetest smile upon that face, which seemed enwrapped in a living sleep, and occupied with an agreeable dream.”

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Marat and Robespierre are among the most enigmatical productions of a very enigmatical movement. During their lives they were not very beautiful in conduct nor very amiable in character; but the casts taken of their faces after their uncomfortable deaths are quiet and peaceful, and the effect they produce is one of loving rather than loathing. In the mask of each the cerebral development is small, especially in the region of the frontal bone; and phrenological experts who have examined them say that their development, or lack of development, taken with their facial traits, indicates ill-balanced minds.

Marat’s face, as David painted him, is that of a North-American Indian with a white skin. The contemporary portraits of Robespierre, on the other hand, represent a mild-mannered man of severe and pensive expression. According to Lamartine, “his forehead was good, but small, and projecting over the temples, as if enlarged by the mass and embarrassed movements of his thoughts. His eyes, much veiled by their lids, and very sharp at the extremities, were deeply buried in the cavities of their orbits; they were of a soft blue color. His nose, straight and small, was very wide at the nostrils, which were high and too expanded. His mouth was large, his lips thin and disagreeably contracted at each corner, his chin small and pointed. His complexion was yellow and livid. The habitual expression of his face was the superficial serenity of a grave mind, and a smile wavering betwixt sarcasm and sweetness. There was _softness_, but of a sinister character. The dominant characteristic of his countenance was the prodigious and continued tension of brow, eyes, mouth, and all the facial muscles.”

The masks of Mirabeau, Marat, and Robespierre are known to have been taken, in each case, after death, “by order of the National Assembly.” Those of Marat and Robespierre in my collection are identical with the wax effigies in the “Chamber of Horrors” in Madame Tussaud’s gallery in London, her catalogue asserting that they are “authentic;” and very fine casts of Mirabeau and Marat are in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, the latter hanging under David’s portrait of Marat, painted from nature immediately after the assassination.

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The contemporaries of Sir Isaac Newton, like those of Kean, were all so much impressed by what he knew and by what he did, that they seldom thought of posterity as caring to know how he looked, either in life or in death. From many different sources, however, we learn, in a fragmentary way, that he was “short but well-set, and inclined to be corpulent;” that “he had a very lively and piercing eye;” that “his hair was abundant and white as silver, without any baldness, and when his peruke was off was a venerable sight;” that “he was a man of no very prominent aspect;” that “his face was almost square, and that his chin had unusual width;” that “although he reached the great age of eighty-four, he retained until the last almost all of his teeth;” and that “his countenance was mild, pleasant, and comely.” Bishop Atterbury said, “in the whole air of his face and make there was nothing of that penetrating sagacity which appears in his compositions. He had something rather languid in his look and manner, which did not raise any very great expectation in those who did not know him;” and Dr. Humphrey Newton, who was his assistant and amanuensis, said that during the many years of their intimate association he never knew him to laugh but once!

His death was not without pain, and his mask will not be recognized readily by those who are familiar with his face as pictured and sculptured with his peruke on.

If Sir David Brewster’s account of Newton’s life be the true one, he was as good as he was great, and nothing can be added to that. His portraits by Lely, Kneller, and other famous painters still exist in different parts of Great Britain.

The terra-cotta bust of Newton, from the hand of Roubilliac, is in the British Museum. His bust and full-length statue in marble, by the same artist, belong to Trinity College, Cambridge. They were both, as is well known, based upon this mask of his face, taken after death, the original of which, made by Roubilliac, is now in the rooms of the Royal Society, at Burlington House in London. It was presented to that institution in 1829 by Samuel Hunter Christie, and the officers of the society have no doubt of its authenticity. Mr. Christie found it by accident in the shop of a dealer in statuary, whose father had purchased it at the sale of Roubilliac’s effects more than half a century before. The dealer parted with it for a few shillings, although he was satisfied that it was the mask of Newton, and by Roubilliac. Charles Richard Weld, in his _History of the Royal Society_, gave a steel engraving of it, and declared that “it presents all the characteristic features of the Society’s former illustrious president.” Only a few copies of it are known to exist, and it is one of the most valuable and important masks in my collection.

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Roubilliac’s mask of Alexander Pope was one of the cherished possessions of Samuel Rogers, but its present whereabouts I have not been able to discover.

The contrasts between the profoundest of England’s philosophers and the bravest of her bruisers are as marked in an intellectual as in a physical way. Ben Caunt, the pugilist, died in London in 1861, universally respected. He was, during the later years of his life, proprietor of the Coach and Horses, a public-house in St. Martin’s Lane, much frequented by his old pupils, and by all the prominent patrons of the prize-ring. He came to America in the early Forties, giving a series of exhibitions throughout the country, but never engaging in any serious encounter here. He was a leader in his own profession, and at one time, perhaps, the best-known man in all England. His portrait, which once adorned the walls of cottage and palace, is still to be found in Miles’s _Pugilistica_, taken at the period of his famous fight with “Bendigo” in 1842. His head is certainly a strong one, and, in a phrenological way, he was better than many of the men among his contemporaries who did better things.

Thackeray, like most Anglo-Indian infants, was sent, when he was about five years of age, to the mother-country for mental and physical nourishment. An aunt, with whom he lived, discovered the child one morning parading about in his uncle’s hat, which exactly fitted him. Fearing some abnormal and dangerous development of the brain, she carried him at once to a famous physician of the day, who is reported to have said, “Don’t be afraid, madam; he has a large head, but there’s a good deal in it!” How much was in it subsequent events have certainly proved. His brain, when he died, fifty-three years later, weighed fifty-eight and a half ounces. In 1849 or 1850, Charlotte Brontë wrote of Thackeray: “To me the broad brow seems to express intellect. Certain lines about the nose and cheek betray the satirist and cynic; the mouth indicates a childlike simplicity—perhaps even a degree of irresoluteness in consistency—weakness in short, but a weakness not unamiable.” And Motley, writing to his wife in 1858, said: “I believe you have never seen Thackeray; he has the appearance of a colossal infant, smooth, white, shining ringlety hair, flaxen, alas! with advancing years; a roundish face, with a little dab of a nose, upon which it is a perpetual wonder how he keeps his spectacles.” This broken nose was always a source of amusement to Thackeray himself; he caricatured it in his drawings, he frequently alluded to it in his speech and in his letters, and he was fond of repeating Douglas Jerrold’s remark to him when he was to stand as godfather to a friend’s son—“Lord, Thackeray, I hope you won’t present the child with your own mug!”

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It is not pleasant to look upon the face of Thackeray—the face of which we love to think so pleasantly—as distorted by death. He was found dead in his bed on the morning of December 24, 1863:—“So young a man,” as Dickens wrote, “that the mother who blessed him in his first sleep blessed him in his last. The final words he corrected in print,” continued Dickens, “were—‘And my heart throbbed with an exquisite bliss.’ God grant that on that Christmas eve when he laid his head back on his pillow, and threw up his arms as he had been wont to do when very weary, some consciousness of duty done, and Christian hope throughout life humbly cherished, may have caused his heart so to throb when he passed away to his Redeemer’s rest!” “And, lo,” said Thackeray himself once, of the most beautiful character in all fiction, his own Thomas Newcome—“And, lo, he whose heart was as that of a little child had answered to his name, and stood in the presence of The Master!”

“We think of Thackeray,” wrote Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh, “as of our Chalmers, found dead in like manner: the same childlike, unspoiled, open face, the same gentle mouth, the same spaciousness and softness of nature, the same look of power. What a thing to think of—his lying there alone in the dark, in the midst of his own mighty London; his mother and his daughters asleep, and, it may be, dreaming of his goodness. Long years of sorrow, labor, and pain had killed him before his time. It was found after death how little life he had to live. He looked always fresh with that abounding silver hair, and his loving, almost infantile face; but he was worn to a shadow, and his hands wasted as if by eighty years.”

The cast of Thackeray’s face was made by Brucciani on that sad Christmas morning, at the request of Dr., now Sir, Henry Thompson; and a cast of his right hand was made at the same time—that honest, faithful, beautiful, wasted right hand, which

“never writ a flattery,
Nor signed the page that registered a lie.”

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Thomas Chalmers was another man of great heart and of great head. He died, as we have seen, as Thackeray died, without warning, but without pain or conflict. He was discovered sitting half erect in his bed, his head reclining quietly on his pillow, the expression of his countenance that of fixed and majestic repose. He had responded cheerfully when his name was called. Thackeray heard the summons evidently in a moment of physical distress; but his “_Adsum_” was just as ready, and no doubt it was quite as willingly uttered.

“In height and breadth and in general configuration,” wrote Julian Charles Young, “Dr. Chalmers was not unlike Coleridge. I have, since I knew Coleridge, sometimes thought that if Chalmers’s head had been buried from sight, I could easily have mistaken him for that remarkable man. His face was pallid and pasty, and, I rather think, showed slight traces of small-pox. His features were ordinary; his hair was scanty, and generally roughed, as if his fingers had often passed through it; his brow was not high, but very broad, and well developed. His skull, phrenologically speaking, argued great mathematical power, but showed deficiency in the very qualities for which he was conspicuous, namely, benevolence and veneration.”

Concerning Coleridge, Young wrote: “His general appearance would have led me to suppose him a dissenting minister. His hair was long, white, and neglected; his complexion was florid; his features were square; his eyes watery and hazy; his brow broad and massive; his build uncouth; his deportment grave and abstracted.”

Charles Cowden Clarke, in his _Recollections_, spoke of Coleridge as “large-presenced, ample-countenanced, grand-foreheaded,” and said that “the upper part of his face was excessively fine. His eyes were large, light gray, prominent, and of a liquid brilliancy. The lower part of his face was somewhat dragged, indicating the presence of habitual pain; but his forehead was prodigious, and like a smooth slab of alabaster.” Leigh Hunt likened his brow to “a great piece of placid marble,” and added that even in his old age “there was something invincibly young in the look of his face.” “This boylike expression” he considered “very becoming in one who dreamed and speculated as Coleridge did when he was really a boy, and who passed his entire life apart from the rest of the world with a book and his flowers.”

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Carlyle’s portrait of Coleridge is peculiarly in the Carlylian vein. “Figure a fat, flabby, incurvated personage, at once short, rotund, and relaxed; with a watery mouth; a snuffy nose; a pair of strange brown, timid, and yet earnest-looking eyes; a high tapering brow; and a great brush of gray hair—and you have some faint idea of Coleridge.”

Coleridge himself was not more flattering to Coleridge. In 1796 he wrote to John Thelwall: “My face, unless when animated by immediate eloquence, expresses great sloth, and great, indeed almost idiotic, good-nature. ’Tis a mere carcass of a face, fat, flabby, and expressive chiefly of inexpression. Yet I am told that my eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are physiognomically good.”

Mrs. Sara Coleridge, in her _Memoir_, gave a long account of Coleridge’s death and burial, in which she said that “his body was opened, according to his own urgent request;” but, as usual in such cases, she did not allude to the making of any cast of his face or head.

Mr. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, however, the son of Derwent Coleridge, who is preparing a _Life_ of his illustrious grandfather, writes, in a private note: “My mother used to tell me that the bust in her possession was by Spurzheim, and was taken from a death-mask; but with regard to Spurzheim, she must have been in error, as he died before Coleridge. Lord Coleridge says that the bust in _his_ possession is by Spurzheim, and was taken from a cast of the poet’s features; but whether he falls into the same error as my mother did, I cannot say. It is, of course, possible that Spurzheim took a life-cast from Coleridge’s face.”

Mr. Ernest Coleridge is inclined to accept the authenticity of the mask in my collection. It certainly bears a strong resemblance to the two busts of which he writes, as well as to the portrait by Allston, now in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Carlyle said that “Wordsworth’s face bore marks of much, not always peaceful, meditation; the look of it not bland or benevolent so much as close, impregnable, and hard.” S. C. Hall wrote that “his eyes were mild and up-looking; his mouth coarse rather than refined; his forehead high rather than broad;” while Greville put it more tersely when he described him as “hard-featured, brown, wrinkled, with prominent teeth, and a few scattered gray hairs.” Leigh Hunt said, in his _Autobiography_: “Certainly I never beheld eyes that looked so inspired or supernatural [as Wordsworth’s]. They were like fires half burning, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two caverns. One might imagine Ezekiel or Isaiah to have had such eyes.”

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Wordsworth reminded Hazlitt “of some of Holbein’s heads—grave, saturnine, with a slight indication of sly humor, a peculiar sweetness in his smile.” Elsewhere Hazlitt spoke of his “intense high, narrow forehead, Roman nose, cheeks furrowed by strong purpose, and a convulsive inclination to laughter about his mouth, which was a good deal at variance with the solemn and stately expression of the rest of his face.” And Sir Humphry and Lady Davy, who were at Wordsworth’s funeral, were both struck by the likeness of his face, in the deep repose of death, to that of Dante. The expression, they thought, was much more feminine than it had been in life, and it suggested strongly the face of his devoted sister, with whom so many of his years had been spent.

Haydon, in his _Journal_, April 13, 1815, wrote: “I had a cast made yesterday of Wordsworth’s face. He bore it like a philosopher. He sat in my dressing-gown with his hands folded; sedate, solemn, and still.” And then Haydon described how, through the open door, he exhibited the unconscious poet, undergoing this unbecoming operation, to curious but disrespectful friends of them both.

Another account of this performance shows us Wordsworth flat on his back on the studio floor, with Charles Lamb dancing about him, and making absurd remarks in order to force the poet to smile, and so spoil the mask. All of which was very characteristic of that “dear delightful,” “poor creature” who was despised by Carlyle, and who was naturally loved by everybody else. What would we not give now for a mask of Lamb himself, dead or alive?

All this happened when Wordsworth was forty-two years of age, and thirty-five years before he died. Sir Henry Taylor in his _Autobiography_, spoke, shortly after the poet’s death, of “a cast taken of a mask of Wordsworth.” He considered it admirable as a likeness, and added that it was so regarded by Mrs. Wordsworth. He saw “a rough grandeur in it, with which, if it was to be converted into marble, posterity might be contented.” But he does not say whether it was a life-mask or a death-mask, and he does not refer to the Haydon mask as such. In no other work, in no biography of Wordsworth, and in no account of his last hours, is any allusion to the mask to be found. The face here reproduced is, without question, that of Wordsworth. It suggests the Wordsworth of middle age; it strongly resembles the portraits painted by Haydon; it is much too young in form and expression for the senile Wordsworth of the well-known Fraser Gallery; and there is little doubt of its being the work of Haydon alluded to above. Haydon is known to have painted several portraits of Wordsworth, one of which exhibits him in a Byron collar and another shows him with eyes rolling in fine frenzy over the composition of a sonnet on one of Haydon’s own pictures. Haydon also introduced Wordsworth as a devout disciple in his large work called “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem,” painted in 1818.

Mr. John Gilmer Speed, in his _Memoirs of Keats_, presents an engraving of “John Keats from the Life-Mask of Haydon in 1818,” and pronounces it the most satisfactory of the likenesses of Keats that he has seen. In no other of the _Lives_ of Keats is any allusion made to this mask; it is not mentioned in any of the published letters to or from Keats, or in _The Correspondence and Table-Talk of Haydon_. Joseph Severn, shortly before he died, told Mr. Richard Watson Gilder that he _believed_ the cast to have been the work of Haydon, and that he prized it as the most interesting, as it is the most real and accurate, portrait of his friend in existence; and through him were procured the few copies of it in this country, one of which is here reproduced. Mr. Gilder considers it much more agreeable than the death-mask must have been, for it not only escapes the haggardness of death, but there is even, so it seems to him, a suggestion of humorous patience in the expression of the mouth. “In this mask,” he adds, “one has the authentic form and shape—the very stamp of the poet’s visage.” And he calls attention to the fact of its remarkable resemblance to more than one of the members of the Keats family whom he has met.

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Charles Cowden Clarke, who does not seem to have been aware of the existence of the mask, said that the best portrait of Keats is the first done by Severn himself, that which is engraved in Hunt’s _Lord Byron and his Contemporaries_. Lord Houghton, in his _Life of Keats_, quoted the description given him by a lady (probably Mrs. B. W. Procter), who watched Keats in the Surrey Institute in London, listening to Hazlitt’s course of Lectures on the British Poets, in the winter of 1817-18. “His countenance,” she said, “lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had an expression as if it had been looking at some glorious sight. His mouth was full and less intellectual than his other features.” Leigh Hunt drew his portrait more carefully. “Every feature was at once strongly cut and delicately alive. If there was any faulty expression, it was in the mouth, which was not without something of a character of pugnacity. The face was rather long than otherwise; the upper lip projected a little over the under; the chin was bold, the cheeks sunken; the eyes mellow and glowing, large, dark, and sensitive; his hair, of a brown color, was fine, and hung in natural ringlets. His head was a puzzle for the phrenologists, being remarkably small in the skull, a singularity which he had in common with Byron and Shelley, whose hats I could not get on.”

Mr. William Sharp quotes a letter of Joseph Severn, written a day or two after the death of Keats, in which he said to Charles Armitage Brown, “Yesterday a gentleman came to cast the face, hand, and foot” of Keats. And on the 3d of April, 1821, John Taylor wrote to Severn from London for “the mask, hand, and foot.” The later history of these interesting casts I have never been able to learn.

The original cast of the life-mask of Keats, made in Haydon’s studio, and very much finer than any of the replicas of it, is in the possession of the National Portrait Gallery in London. It was given by Keats himself to his intimate friend John Hamilton Reynolds, just before Keats went abroad to die. Reynolds bequeathed it to his sister, Miss Charlotte Reynolds, by whom it was presented, with a clear pedigree, to the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery. This cast, with the mask of Cromwell, and a copy of the mask of Dr. Johnson, are, curiously enough, the only life-masks or death-masks in the institution in question.

The printed portraits of Johnson are very many. He himself said, once, of the painting by Trotter, “Well, thou art an ugly fellow; but still, I believe thou art like the original.” George Kearsley wrote that “his face was capable of great expression, both in respect to intelligence and mildness, as all those can witness who have seen him in the flow of conversation, or under the influence of grateful feelings;” and Bishop Percy wrote, “Johnson’s countenance, when in good humor, was not disagreeable. His face clear, his complexion good, and his features not ill-formed; many ladies have thought he might not have been unattractive when young.”

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The original of the mask of Johnson belongs to the Royal Literary Fund, the secretary of which, Mr. A. Llewellyn Roberts, in giving his consent to the reproduction of it here, writes as follows concerning it: “It was taken from a cast after death, under the direction of Dr. Johnson’s medical attendant, Mr. Cruikshanks, who informed his daughter, into whose possession it came, that it was a remarkably correct likeness. Unfortunately there is no record of the artist’s name, but it is alleged that each member of Dr. Johnson’s family had a copy.” This particular copy was given to the Royal Literary Fund by William Hutchins, who lived in Hanover Square. There is no reference to the taking of the mask of Johnson to be found in any of the editions of Boswell’s _Life_ of the great lexicographer.

Keats and Haydon first met in the house of Leigh Hunt in November, 1816, and to their mutual delight. They became very intimate upon very short acquaintance, and the poet was constantly to be found in the studio of the painter; they vowed that they were dearer to each other than brothers, and they prayed that their hearts might be buried together. Naturally a friendship so enthusiastic in its beginning did not last very long, and Haydon seems to have been most unjust in his reflections upon Keats, written some time after Keats’s heart had been buried in Rome—and alone! Haydon wrote in the first flush of his intimacy with Keats: “Never have I had such irresistible and perpetual urgings of future greatness. I have been like a man with air-balloons under his arm-pits and ether in his soul; while I was painting, walking, or thinking, beaming flashes of energy followed and impressed me—they came over me, and shot across me, and shook me, till I lifted up my heart and thanked God.”

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This is Haydon upon himself. Macaulay looked at him in a different light. “Haydon,”—he wrote in his _Diary_ in 1853—“Haydon was exactly the vulgar idea of a man of genius. He had all of the morbid peculiarities which are supposed by fools to belong to intellectual superiority—eccentricity, jealousy, caprice, indefinite disdain for other men; and yet he was as poor, commonplace a creature as any in the world. He painted signs, and gave himself more airs than if he had painted the Cartoons. Whether you struck him or stroked him, starved him or fed him, he snapped at your hand in just the same way!”

In the _Memoir_ of Haydon by his son is a fine engraving of the death-mask of Haydon, a replica of which is in my collection. This mask, with that of Jeremy Bentham, was broken, as you here see them, by careless Custom-house officers on their arrival in New York a few years ago.

James Parton quoted Burr as saying of Jeremy Bentham, “It is impossible to conceive a physiognomy more strongly marked with ingenuousness and philanthropy.” John Stuart Mill said of him that “he was a boy till the last.” And at the age of eighty-two he himself wrote to an old friend: “I am alive, though turned of eighty; still in good health and spirits; codifying like a dragon.” “Candor in the countenance, mildness in the looks, serenity upon the brow, calmness in the language, coolness in the movements, imperturbability united with the keenest feeling:” such, according to Brissot de Warville, were the characteristics of Bentham.

Since St. Denis of France used to walk about with his head under his arm, or used to sit about with his head in his lap, in the third century of our Christian era, no _post-mortem_ performance is more grotesque than that of Jeremy Bentham, who left his body by will to Dr. Southwood Smith. The legatee was instructed to dissect it, and to deliver lectures upon it to his medical students and to the public generally. After these anatomical demonstrations a skeleton was to be made, and was made, of the bones. Dr. Smith “endeavored to preserve the head untouched”—the words are his own—“merely drawing away the fluids by placing it under an air-pump over sulphuric acid. By this means the head was rendered as hard as the skulls of the New-Zealanders, but all expression, of course, was gone. Seeing this would not do for exhibition, I had a mould made in wax by a distinguished French artist, taken from David’s bust, Pickersgill’s picture, and my own ring. The artist succeeded in producing one of the most admirable likenesses ever seen. I then had the skeleton stuffed out to fit Bentham’s own clothes, and this was likewise fitted to the trunk. The figure was placed seated on the chair in which he usually sat, one hand holding the walking-stick which was his constant companion when he went out, called by him ‘Dapple.’ The whole was enclosed in a mahogany case with glass doors.” Bentham was wont to amuse himself in his boyish old age with the vision of his presiding, as it were, in proper person at meetings of his disciples, and he even used to anticipate his being wheeled to the top of the table on festive occasions!

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His figure as here described is still to be seen in the rooms of University College, Gower Street, London. It is curious that Dr. Smith did not go to the mask for a representation of Bentham’s actual face. That such a mask was made, George Combe testified in the columns of the London _Phrenological Journal_ a few years after Bentham’s death. He said that it was in his own possession, and showed that “the knowing organ was large and the reflective organs only full.” The mask, he said, was very like the portrait of Bentham reproduced in Tait’s edition of Bentham’s works. But he does not say whether it was a death-mask or the life-mask known to have been made by Turnerelli, an Italian sculptor living in London, in the early part of this century, and when Bentham was not more than fifty years of age. He was eighty-five when he died. This plaster mask of Bentham has been compared carefully with the wax effigy in University College. The mouth, the cranial arch, the entire upper part of the face, and the general shape of the head are very like, although in the wax mask the chin is shorter and rounder, and the eyes, of course, are open.

The mask of Rossetti was made by Brucciani, after death. Only three or four copies were cast, and the mould is in the possession of Mr. William M. Rossetti, through whose courtesy I am able to reproduce it here, and who writes: “I should say that my family and myself do not at all like the version of my brother’s face presented by the mould and cast. In especial, singular though it may sound, the dimensions of the forehead seem wofully narrowed and belied. But of course, from a certain point of view, the cast tells truth of its own kind.”

Mr. Hall Caine, writing of his own copy of the mask, says: “I ought perhaps to add that it does not give a good impression of Dante Rossetti. The upper part of the head is very noble, but the lower part is somewhat repellant.”

A fourth copy belongs to Mr. George F. Watts, the painter, whose portrait of Rossetti is so well known.

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An anonymous writer in _Blackwood’s Magazine_ for January, 1893, who seems to have known Rossetti intimately, thus describes the head and front of the poet: “He was short, squat, bull-doggish; he belonged to the Cavour type, but the sallow face was massive and powerful. The impression of solidity is somewhat toned down in Watts’s portrait, and the face is thinner and more worn than when I knew him. Sleepless nights and protracted pain may have changed him in later years and made the ideal Rossetti more manifest. Except for the meditative, tranquil eye (one thought of the ox-eyed Janus), there was nothing ideal about him. He was intensely Italian, indeed, but it was the sleek and well-fed citizen of Milan or Genoa that he recalled, not the slim and romantic hero of Verdi or Donizetti.”

Cavour, according to George Eliot, who once got a glimpse of him in an Italian railway station, was a man pleasant to look upon, with a smile half kind and half caustic. He gave her the impression that “he thought of many matters, but thanked Heaven and made no boast of them.” Elsewhere she said: “The pleasantest sight was Count Cavour in plainest dress, with a head full of power, mingled with _bonhomie_.”

Mr. O. M. Spencer, in _Harper’s Magazine_ for August, 1871, devotes much space to the personal appearance of Cavour, who was, according to this authority, “of medium stature, with a tendency to corpulency; quick and energetic in his movements, with a forehead broad, high, and spacious; his eyes were partially closed by weakness and still further concealed by spectacles; his mouth not well formed and somewhat voluptuous, over which played an ironical smile, the joint offspring of mirth and disdain. Nevertheless, the _tout ensemble_ of his countenance was expressive of benignity. Simple in his manners, though dignified in his bearing, he would have been recognized anywhere as a sub-alpine country gentleman, familiar with the usages of the court. Though of an irascible, phosphoric temperament, he rarely or never lost his self-control. Generous in his enmities and liberal in his friendships, he was chary of his confidence and exclusive in his intimacies. It may be that he was devoid of faith and affection, but he certainly loved Italy, and believed in his own mission.”

The death-mask of Cavour, and that of Pius IX., I found lying peacefully side by side in a little plaster-shop in Rome in the autumn of 1893. The Pope was assuredly not devoid of faith and affection; and if he loved Italy less, it was only because he loved the Church of Rome more.

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Pius IX., we were told, at the time of his death in 1878, was a hale and vigorous septuagenarian, with a fine presence, a rich and melodious voice, a facile utterance, which rose at times to eloquence, and a benign countenance. For three days the body of the Pope lay in state in the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament in St. Peter’s, and an eye-witness of the ceremonies wrote: “The face, perfectly visible, seemed unchanged from what it had been in life, and the expression was one of absolute peace; the calmness, indeed, was almost like that of sleep. A slight flush, even, was on the cheek, and a smile seemed to hover about the lips. The white hair peeped from under the mitre, and in the crossed hands, covered with red gloves, lay a crucifix suspended from a chain about his neck.”

Signor A. Gallenza, in a volume entitled _The Pope and the King_, spoke of the pontiff’s face in death as “handsome and dignified, with something like sternness in the lofty brow, strangely contrasting with that set smile so winning in the living man himself, but which was merely the result of a muscular contraction, a dimple which even death could not smooth.”

Henry Crabb Robinson wrote from Italy in 1831: “I occasionally saw Leopardi, the poet, a man of acknowledged genius and of unimpeachable character. He was a man of good family and a scholar, but he had a feeble frame, was sickly and deformed.”

Leopardi’s life was very unhappy. His bodily infirmities humiliated him, and domestic trials greatly affected his spirit. He seems to have inspired very little tenderness even in the heart of his own mother, and he died as miserably as he lived, longing for the eternal rest from pain and neglect. His contemporaries have left almost nothing on record concerning his personal appearance, but the few existing portraits of him, and particularly this cast of his dead face, certainly show sweetness mingled with strength. Mr. Howells, in his _Modern Italian Poets_, quotes Niebuhr as saying of the young Leopardi: “Conceive of my astonishment, when I saw standing before me, in the poor little chamber, a mere youth, pale and shy, frail in person and obviously in ill-health, who was by far the first, in fact the only, Greek philologist in Italy.”

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The best and most sympathetic portrait of John Boyle O’Reilly is the following, to be found in the life of that gentleman written by his friend, Mr. James Jeffrey Roche: “Recalling him as he then was [1870], the abiding memory of him is that of his marvellously sweet smile, and his strikingly clear and frank gaze; the beauty of his face lay chiefly in his eyes. The official advertisement of his escape says that those eyes were brown, and prison descriptions are generally more accurate than flattering. Almost anybody looking at him less closely, would have said that his eyes were black. As a matter of fact, they were hazel, but his dark skin and jet-black eyebrows and hair gave an impression of blackness to the large, well-formed eyes beneath. They were very expressive, whether flashing with some sudden fancy or glowing with a deeper burning thought, or sparkling with pure boyish fun. There was another expression, which they sometimes wore at this period of his life, and which may be described for lack of a better word, as a hunted look—not frightened or furtive, but an alert, watchful expression, which made it easy to understand how he could have deliberately armed himself with the firm intention of surrendering his liberty only with his life.... No portrait ever made of him does justice to that which was the great charm of his countenance—its wonderful light and life. His eyes had the depth and fire and mobile color of glowing carbuncle. For the rest he had the rich brown complexion, so familiar in after-years; a small black mustache, only half concealing his finely-cut mouth, and revealing a set of perfectly white, regular teeth. His form was slight, but erect and soldier-like. He carried his head well raised, and a little thrown back. He was a man whom no one would pass without a second glance.”

It is rather a curious fact that the men most interested, naturally, in the study of the human face, and in its portrayal with chisel or pencil, are the men most poorly represented in this collection; Sir Thomas Lawrence being the only painter of portraits, and Hiram Powers, Haydon, and Canova the only makers of masks, whose masks are here presented. Three views of the life-mask of Sir Thomas Lawrence were engraved by R. J. Lane, in 1830. They are contained on one plate, and represent the full face, as well as profiles looking to the right and to the left. The print is very rare, and bears the following inscription: “From a plaster cast taken at the age of thirty-four, in the possession of an attached friend.”

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Edward H. Baily, the sculptor, is known to have made a cast of Lawrence’s features after death. “The head was finely shaped and bald, and it bore a striking resemblance to that of Canning, although the face lacked something of Canning’s elevated expression.” This death-mask is here presented.

Lawrence is said to have been a beautiful creature in his boyhood, with bright eyes, and long chestnut hair. In later life we are told that “although not tall—he was under five feet nine inches—his beautiful face, active figure, agreeable manners, and fine voice were not thrown away upon either lords or ladies, emperors or kings.” Opie said of him once, “Lawrence made coxcombs of his sitters, and his sitters made a coxcomb of him.” And George IV., the Sir Hubert Stanley of fine manners, pronounced him “a high-bred gentleman.” This is praise indeed! Another, and perhaps not so exalted an authority, said, “Lawrence’s appearance was exceedingly graceful and gentlemanly. His countenance was open and noble, his eyes were large and lustrous and very expressive.” Dr. R. R. Madden, in his _Memoirs of the Countess of Blessington_, quotes a brother artist, and a friend of Lawrence, as saying of him, “As a man Sir Thomas Lawrence was amiable, kind, generous, and forgiving. His manner was elegant but not high-bred. He had too much the air of always submitting. He had smiled so often, and so long, that at last his smile had the appearance of being set in enamel.”

The mask of J. M. W. Turner formerly belonged to the late Dr. Pocock of Brighton, England, and is now in the possession of Mr. William Ward, of London. It was made, after death, by the late Thomas Woolner. There are but few portraits of Turner in existence, the most life-like being an engraving by M. M. Halloway, of a half-length profile sketch bearing this inscription: “Drawn by me in the print-room of the British Museum. J. T. Smith.” Unfortunately no date is attached.

Much has been put on record about Turner’s personal peculiarities and eccentricities; but little has been said by his contemporaries concerning his personal appearance. The best picture, although a slight one, is from the pen of Mr. W. P. Frith: “Turner was a very short man, with a large head, and a face usually much muffled to protect it from the draughts for which the rooms [of the Royal Academy] were celebrated.”

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Cyrus Redding, in his _Past Celebrities_, speaks of Turner’s “unprepossessing exterior, his reserve, and his austerity of language.” Wilkie Collins once described him as seated on the top of a flight of steps, astride of a box, on Varnishing Day at the Royal Academy, “a shabby Bacchus, nodding like a mandarin at his picture, which he with a pendulum-motion now touched with his brush, now receded from.” And Peter Cunningham, in an almost brutal way, set down Turner as “short, stout, and bandy-legged, with a red, pimply face, imperious and covetous eyes, and a tongue which expressed his sentiments with murmuring reluctance.” Sir William Allen, according to Cunningham, was accustomed to describe the great painter as a “Dutch Skipper.”

In view of all this, it is not remarkable that Turner had strong objections to sitting for his portrait. He felt that any familiarity with his face and figure would affect the poetry of his works in the popular mind. “No one,” he said, “would believe, after seeing my likeness, that I painted these pictures.” A contemporary portrait of Turner, fishing in all his uncouth enthusiasm, with shabby garments, and a cotton umbrella over his head, is unfortunately too long to be quoted here.

Hiram Powers died in Florence in 1873, and lies in the Protestant Cemetery of that city. His mask, after death, was made by Thomas Ball and Joel T. Hart. Dr. Samuel Osgood said of Powers in 1870: “In his looks, his ideas, as well as in all his works, he is a man of the golden mean. There is nothing too much in his make or his manner. He is a good specimen of a well-formed man, and his own statue would make a good sign for the front of his studio.” In October, 1847, Mrs. Browning wrote: “Mr. Powers, the sculptor, is our chief friend and favorite. A most charming, simple, straightforward, genial American—as simple as the man of genius he has proved himself to be.... The sculptor has eyes like a wild Indian’s, so black and full of light—you would scarcely marvel if they clove the marble without the help of his hand.” “Mr. Powers called in the evening,” wrote Hawthorne in his _Italian Note-book_ in 1858—“a plain personage, characterized by strong simplicity and warm kindliness, with an impending brow, and large eyes which kindle as he speaks. He is gray and slightly bald, but does not seem elderly nor past his prime. I accept him at once as an honest and trustworthy man, and shall not vary from this judgment.”

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Mr. Preston Powers, who possesses the mask of his father, has also in his possession a life-mask and a death-mask of Agassiz, and a death-mask of Sumner; the last two having been made by himself. Through his courtesy I am enabled to reproduce them all here.

The life-mask of Agassiz was made when the subject was about forty years of age, and by an artist now unknown. It was given to Mr. Powers by Mr. Alexander Agassiz at the time of the elder Agassiz’s death.

E. P. Whipple, in his _Recollections of Eminent Men_, said of Agassiz: “You could not look at him without feeling that you were in the presence of a magnificent specimen of physical, mental, and moral manhood; that in him was realized Sainte-Beuve’s ideal of a scientist—the soul of a sage in the body of an athlete. At that time [1845] he was one of the comeliest of men. His full and ruddy face, glowing with health and animation, was crowned by a brow which seemed to be the fit home for such a comprehensive intelligence.” And Longfellow, in his _Journal_ (January 9, 1847), wrote: “In the evening a reunion at Felton’s to meet Mr. Agassiz, the Swiss geologist and naturalist. A pleasant, voluble man, with a bright beaming face.”

Mr. Curtis, in an oration upon Charles Sumner, delivered shortly after the statesman’s death, said that “his look, his walk, his dress, his manner, were not those of the busy advocate, even in his younger years, but of the cultivated and brilliant man of society, the Admirable Crichton of the saloons.”

Mrs. Jefferson Davis, in her _Life_ of her husband, spoke of Sumner as “a handsome, unpleasing man, and an athlete whose physique proclaimed his physical strength.” And Mr. Seward wrote to his wife in 1856: “Sumner is much changed for the worse. His elasticity and vigor are gone. He walks, and in every way moves, like a man who has not altogether recovered from a paralysis, or like a man whose sight is dimmed, and his limbs stiffened with age.”

At the autopsy it was discovered that the brain of Sumner showed no trace of the assault from the effects of which he suffered so terribly.

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Canova must have been a beautiful character. It is not often that so much good is spoken, even of the dead, as has been spoken of him since he died; and if the chroniclers are right, he deserved it all. In personal appearance, however, we read that he was not particularly attractive. His hair was black and luxuriant, and his forehead of noble dimensions, but the outline of his features was neither grand nor extraordinary. The phrenologists gave him a massive brain upward and forward of the ears, wonderful constructive talent, with large ideality and strong intellect. He was very abstemious in his habits, very thoughtful, and a hard worker. Count Cicognara, in a biographical sketch of Canova, thus described his face during his very last hours: “His visage became, and remained for some time, highly radiant and expressive, as if his mind was absorbed in some sublime conception, creating powerful and unusual emotion in all around him. Thus he must have looked when imagining that venerable figure of the pontiff who is represented in the attitude of prayer in the Vatican. His death was wholly unattended by the agonies which make a death-bed so distressing, nor did even a sigh or convulsion announce his dying moment.”

This is the visage which his friends cast in plaster, and it was, no doubt, the basis of the medallion bust of Canova, in profile, which forms part of the pyramidal tomb erected by certain of his pupils in 1827, in the church of Sante Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, the pantheon of Venice. The monument, according to Mr. Ruskin, is “consummate in science, intolerable in affectation, ridiculous in conception; null and void to the uttermost in invention and feeling;” and the medallion represents the great sculptor in all his glorious prime of strength and beauty.

The death-mask of Canova, as here reproduced, in its peaceful and quiet repose, is in strong contrast with that of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, shown upon a subsequent page.

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Portraits in Plaster, from the Collection of Laurence HuttonChapter II: Part 2

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