Madame Tussauds practiced her sculpting skills on freshly guillotined heads
Topics: Art
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: GL Archive / Patti McConville / Alamy Stock Photo
Topics: Art
Madame Tussauds is one of the most popular tourist attractions in London, with it attracting over 2.5 million visitors every year.
For those unaware, Madame Tussauds - which is a chain of wax museums located all over the world - features more than 400 wax replicas of some of the most recognisable people in the world.
In it is the only place you'll be able to have a selfie with Donald Trump, a chat with King Charles III, and pose next to Adele in one single day. Well, their life-like waxed versions anyway.
But while it may be dubbed as 'London's biggest tourist attraction' today, the business actually built out of beheadings - so let us explain.
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For those that may not have known, the founder of the Madame Tussaud's museum was a woman named Marie Tussaud - though her surname was Grosholtz before she married.
Tussaud was born into a family of public executioners in 1761, who was taught by wax maker Phillipe Curtius all there was to know about wax sculpture.
It was quickly discovered that Tussaud had a natural talent for wax sculptures, with her sculpturing some of notable people at the time such as Francois Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin.
From 1780 to 1789 - which was the outbreak of the French Revolution - Tussaud's served as an art tutor to Madame Elisabeth, Louis XVI's sister.
This is when things started to get a bit dark, as during the Reign of Terror, Tussaud had the job of making death masks, some of which were actually from her real-life friends.
The heads were served up by a guillotine - making the experience a rather bloody one for Tussaud's.
During this time, Tussaud and her mother were thrown into prison, with the Madame Tussauds website stating the duo were "forced to prove her allegiance to the Revolution by making death masks of executed nobles and the King and Queen."
So Tussaud crafted sculptures of more heads, including Queen Marie Antoinette and Maximilien Robespierre.
During the revolution, these so-called 'death masks' were paraded throughout Paris as a sign of victory.
After that and a failed marriage to Francois Tussaud, the wax artist left France for England and took her two sons and collection of wax models with her.
And in 1835 she set up the Madame Tussauds Museum, which we all now know as this massive tourist attraction housing some of the biggest people even known - in wax, of course!