The art teacher of Madame Elizabeth, the sister of King Louis XVI of France, who was sentenced to death by the French revolutionaries and escaped the guillotine.
Madame Tussauds waxwork
Madame Tussauds. United Kingdom United States. A wax museum in London, with smaller museums in many other major cities. It was founded in 1835 by the wax sculptor Marie Toussard. It was pronounced "Madame Tussard's". Madame Tussauds is a major tourist attraction in London and displays wax works of famous and historical figures as well as popular film and television characters played by famous actors.
The wax museum she founded in London and Marie Tussard's beginnings in wax sculpture...
Marie Toussard was born Marie Grossholtz in 1761 in Strasbourg, France. Her mother worked for Philip Curtius in Bern, Switzerland, a doctor skilled in creating wax models. Curtius taught Tussard to make wax models from an early age. She went to Paris and took her young apprentice who was 6 years old with her.
Grosholtz created her first wax sculpture of Voltaire in 1777. At the age of 17, she became the art teacher of Madame Elizabeth, sister of King Louis XVI of France, at the Palace of Versailles. During the French Revolution, she spent three months in prison awaiting execution, but was released after the intervention of a powerful friend. During the revolution she made models of many famous victims.
After his death in 1794, Grosholtz inherited Curtius' collection of wax models. For the next 33 years, she toured Europe with a traveling display from the collection. She married Francois Toussard in 1795 and took his surname. She named her exhibition after Madame Tussauds. In 1802 she accepted an invitation from the lanternist and phantasmagoria pioneer Paul Philidor to exhibit her work in conjunction with an exhibition held at London's Lyceum Theatre. She didn't do particularly well financially, with Philider taking half of her profits.
She was unable to return to France due to the Napoleonic Wars, so traveled throughout Great Britain and Ireland to exhibit her collection. From 1831 she held a series of short leases on the upper floors of "Baker Street Bazaar" (on the west side of Baker Street, Dorset Street and King Street, London). The premises later featured in the Drews-Portland series of trials in 1898-1907. This became Tussard's first permanent home in 1836.
Poster for the Tussauds Wax Exhibition in Baker Street, London, 1835
By 1835 Marie Tussard settled in Baker Street, London and opened a museum. A major attraction in her museum was the Chamber of Horrors. The name was probably credited to a contributor to Punch in 1845, but Toussard himself seems to have used it in advertisements as early as 1843.
This part of the show included the victims of the French Revolution and the newly created characters of murderers and other criminals. Other notables were added, including Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, Henry VIII and Queen Victoria.
Some of the sculptures made by Marie Tussard herself still exist. The gallery originally had about 400 different images, but a fire in 1925 and a German bomb in 1941 severely damaged many such old models. The casts survived allowing the historical waxwork to be restored and these can be seen in the museum's history exhibition. The oldest figure on display is Curtius' Madame du Barry from 1765 and part of the wax work left to Grosholtz upon his death. Other faces of Tussard's time include Robespierre and George III. In 1842 she made a self-portrait, which is now displayed at the entrance to her museum. She died in her sleep on April 16, 1850 in London.
By 1883, due to limited space and rising costs in Baker Street, one of her grandsons, Joseph Randall, arranged for a building to be constructed on the present site of the museum in Marylebone Road. The new exhibition galleries were opened on 14 July 1884 and were a great success. But Randall had bought half of his cousin Louisa's business in 1881, and building costs had depleted his capital. He formed a limited company in 1888 to attract fresh capital, but it had to be dissolved due to disagreements among family shareholders. In February 1889, Toussard was sold to a group of businessmen led by Edwin Josiah Poyser. In 1908, the first wax sculpture of a young Winston Churchill was made; A total of ten have been made since then. In 1970, Madame Tussauds opened its first foreign branch in Amsterdam.
In 2005, Madame Tussauds was sold to a Dubai-based company, Dubai International Capital, for £800. In May 2007, Blackstone Group bought Tussauds Group from then-owner Dubai International Capital for $1.9 billion; After acquiring Tussauds, Dubai International Capital acquired 20% of Merlin Entertainment.
On July 17, 2007, as part of the financing of the Tussauds deal, Marilyn private investor Nick
