Archbishop Jeremy Taylor 1613 - 1667
Evangelical Victorians wanted to have a spiritually positive passage to the afterlife, and so the ritual of dying was a practice that was important. A notable habit of the victorians were creating 'death masks', of which are available to view on the internet of very famous historic figures that give us the closest insight as to what their faces looked like:
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| Sir Isaac Newton |
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| Napoleon |
Death masks were a way of having an exact replica of the deceased person's face, and were mostly created for the wealthier and famous people of society as they were expensive to create. This could then be used as a basis for the face in portraits that were painted after they died. These death masks would be moulded as immediately as possible after death so that the cast would be as accurate as possible, otherwise the face would change too much because of the process of death.
To make the death mask, the corpse would have to be sat up so as to be able to get a mould of a good portion of the head:
What I have noticed is that most of the death masks are of men and only a handful are of women. This may be because of the fact that death masks were popular during times of a patriarchal society and men were in practically all of the powerful and wealthy positions. This is unfortunate as there are historic women figures that could have had a death mask which would have benefitted artists and those that study death masks and recreate them in the present day. However it is a representation of the fact that society revolved around men in the victorian era.
Resources
http://www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-death/victorians-and-the-art-of-dying
http://onelondonone.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/macabre-look-at-death-masks.html (also photo resource)
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe_mla/w/wax_death_mask_of_oliver_cromw.aspx
http://www.kuriositas.com/2012/01/death-masks-of-famous.html
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