Isaac Newton, d. 1727
Craig Davies for Art-Sheep
What exactly are death masks and why the heck they are so creepy? We’re pretty much wondering that ourselves and we can’t but share your confusion.
After a short search -and by short search we mean Wikipedia, a death mask is a creepy memento made out of wax or plaster created as effigy of deceased people, a custom that dates back to ancient Egypt. It was also used as a permanent record kept of unknown corpses until its later replacement by photography and since it was popular for centuries, some of the most famous people in history have one.
Taken from the Laurence Hutton Collection of Life and Death Masks, located at the Manuscripts Division of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, here are some images of famous death masks -still sounds creepy by the way, depicting famous people of history, from Abraham Lincoln to Leo Tolstoy.
Images via
Elizabeth I, d. 1603
Oliver Cromwell, d. 1658
Jonathan Swift, d. 1745
Laurence Sterne, d. 1768
Benjamin Franklin, d. 1790
Edmund Burke, d. 1797
George Washington, d. 1799
Thomas Paine, d. 1809
John Keats, d. 1821
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, d. 1832
Jeremy Bentham, d. 1832
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, d. 1834
Aaron Burr, d. 1836
Abraham Lincoln, d. 1865
Robert E. Lee, d. 1870
Ulysses S. Grant, d. 1885
Franz Liszt, d. 1886
Walt Whitman, d. 1892
Leo Tolstoy, d. 1910
