You may recall Norman Rosenthal putting a call into the Art Loss Register a few years back. Some sly fox seemed to have 'borrowed' - and forgotten to return - one of the Royal Academy's most treasured possessions. The disappearance of JMW Turner's death mask originally came to light following a request to borrow it in 2002. Rosenthal and his staff at that time noticed the mask had last been recorded 17 years earlier, when it was moved between the warren of store rooms at the Academy's home on Piccadilly. No one had bothered to record who took it away.
Turner was the RA's most lauded son and most generous benefactor at the time, leaving them £20,000 when he died in 1851. As the mammoth task of cataloguing the 17,000 artworks that make up the collection of the RA draws to a close this year, the mask remains at large.
The revival of the ancient craft of moulding a dead person's head is currently being revived by artist Nick Reynolds. He is writing about its history in a book to be published later this year and preparing an exhibition of his own death masks which will be shown at the new Found gallery in London's Shoreditch. "They are the only true, three-dimensional representations available of the subject in death - unlike paintings or photographs - as they are created by taking a mould directly from the subject's actual features. What makes these masks so interesting to me, is that the types of people cast were seminal figures in their day- ranging from kings and heads of state, to poets, politicians, composers and even murderers', said Reynolds.
Napoleon's death mask was turned into a piece of art by Magritte who painted clouds on it. Mary Queen of Scots had her head cast after it was cut off. Lenin, Stalin, Himmler, Ned Kelly have all been similarly immortalised.
Death masks are said to have originated in ancient Egypt where casts were used as models for carving portraits of the recently deceased. They were also laid over the 'face' of a mummified body as it was believed they would guard the soul from evil spirits on its way to the afterworld. Most of the unfortunate bunch beheaded in the French Revolution got to live on as a death mask but the process became most popular during Victorian Britain when nearly every wealthy family wanted their dead loved one's face staring out at them from a candlelit wall recess. A lot of Roman households wanted the same thing.
Proponents of phrenology and ethnography also used death masks and life masks for scientific and pseudoscientific purposes. Nowadays, X-rays and photography have made the practical function of the the death mask defunct. So, except for Reynolds and the few brave souls who don't mind hanging round in morgues for their art, the process is confined to making moulds from folk who are still breathing. Hollywood's sons and daughters have been known to sit for hours covered in alginate (the substance dentists use to take teeth moulds), in order to produce a facsimile of their head which make-up and prosthetics can then work with.
Reynolds is working with top Hollywood special effects person and life caster, John Schoonraad, to create his masks. They set up Memorial Casts late last year (see the link below) and use alginate moulds to create plaster moulds which can then be used to produce the finished mask in bronze or fibreglass. The first death mask Reynolds made on his own was exhibited in his 'Cons to Icons' show in 1995. The exhibition was about nine British criminals who were once vilified then found themselves being treated like rock stars. Howard Marks, Ronnie Biggs, and Reynold's own father Bruce Reynolds (who masterminded the Great Train Robbery) were represented by life-casts but the show's one death mask was the head of George "Taters" Chatham, a notorious East End criminal, responsible for the Eastcastle Street mail van raid in 1952.
Reynolds had been keen to find Chatham - sometimes called the 'Atilla the Hun of the pillaging game' - having heard that he was still criminally active well into his eighties. When he finally tracked him down, the man was dead. "I asked his sister if I could cast his head anyway", Reynolds told me. "She wasn't keen at first, then, when she saw her brother had died with a smile on his face, she took it to be a sign from God. The idea was that he had found peace and would be forgiven for his life of crime. So that's where it all began."
Perhaps the mask he'll remember making most was of his good friend Lord Jago Eliot, who died last year from a severe epileptic fit. One of Eliot's ambitions in death, he had frequently told Nick, was to have his body, or at least his head, cast in bronze so that he could be taken to parts of the world he had never got round to seeing in life.
Peoples' attitude to death is clearly changing - hence the popularity of Gunther von Hagen's 'Body Worlds' exhibition at the Atlantis Gallery on Brick Lane a few years ago. The Chapman Brothers are obsessed with death. So is Damien Hirst. And Reynolds is continuing to look for dead people that interested him in life to cast, hoping to build on his already impressive body of work in time for his next London show. "Well, there's no shortage of dead people is there?"
www.memorialcasts.comis the website for death masks
www.lifecast.co.uk is Schoonraad's website for life masks
Laura K Jones
Nick Reynolds at work on Ronnie Biggs
Bruce Reynolds by Nick Reynolds
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