Laurence Hutton (1834–1904) was an American author, critic, and
editor who later became a lecturer in English literature at Princeton.
Today he is best remembered for leaving the University a remarkable
collection of life and death masks that he spent many years accumulating
and researching. This body of casts reveals a vital element of Hutton’s
collecting praxis: his belief that death was a critical (perhaps even the
critical) component of enduring celebrity. Death masks – a wax or
plaster cast taken posthumously from a person’s face – were executed
for a number of reasons: scientific, artistic, or intensely personal. In all
cases, though, there was a desire to preserve a hypothetically objective
likeness of an important person, marking a shift between the perceived
binary of life and death. While the death mask facilitated a sense of
proximity to the celebrity body, Hutton was driven to flesh these faces
out with an array of ephemera, including portraits, autographs,
photographs of graves, strands of hair, and even casts of their hands.
For Hutton, this triangulation figured as an attempt to capture a physical
closeness to the bodies of departed celebrities, an urge he articulated
explicitly in his unpublished writings. This article offers a new lens
through which to consider celebrity mementoes – as relics in which the ‘imprint’ of the individual is sought and as icons through which we
attempt to materialise celebrity.
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