Laurence Hutton Death Mask Collection
60-odd plaster casts of the recently dead, in the Firestone Library
Inside the main floor of Firestone Library, one corridor displays sixty-odd plaster death masks from Laurence Hutton's bequest — a quietly extraordinary collection, half historical archive and half cabinet of curiosities. The displays are sober: each face mounted on a black background, with a small caption explaining who they were.
Access is free during library opening hours, but you may need a visitor pass at the desk. Allow twenty minutes. Best combined with a wander through the rest of Firestone, which is one of the largest open-stack university libraries in the world.
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A story
Laurence Hutton (1843–1904) was a literary critic and editor who spent decades assembling one of the world's strangest private collections: plaster cast death masks (and a few life masks) of famous nineteenth-century writers, statesmen, and criminals. The collection includes the faces of Beethoven, Newton, Aaron Burr, Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Keats, Mendelssohn, and Burns — each taken hours after death, when the features were still soft enough to cast. Hutton bequeathed it to Princeton in 1894.