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Death masks

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Near the end of the 19th century, a mysterious young woman with a beguiling smile turned up in Paris. She became a huge sensation. She also happened to be dead. You'd probably recognize her face yourself. You might have even touched it.

Radiolabber Sean Cole explains that, long ago, death masks were a common way of preserving the faces of famous people--clay moulds were made of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and so on. But one of the most famous death masks was of a woman who wasn't famous at all when she was alive. BBC producer Jeremy Grange tells the story of this face, known simply as "L'inconnue de la Seine" (the unknown woman of the Seine), and how it found its way into living rooms across Europe.

Fast forward to 1960. An Austrian doctor named Peter Safar was developing the basics of CPR, and he needed a way for people to practice his new method. He tracked down a toy maker in Norway, Asmund Laerdal, who had constructed prosthetic wounds for use in military training. Little did Safar know that Laerdal had a compelling, personal reason for getting involved. Ultimately, Laerdal decided the best way to learn artificial resuscitation would to practice on a dummy. All he needed was the perfect face.
Asmund Laerdal with the CPR doll Resusci Anne.
Sean tells Jad & Robert how the dummy got her face, and about the real woman behind the mask.
L'inconnue (wiki commons) and Resusci Anne (Phil_Parker/flickrCC-BY-2.0)

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Radiolabber Sean Cole explains that, long ago, death masks were a common way of preserving the faces of famous people--clay moulds were made of Napoleon, Beethoven, Lincoln, and so on.

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Who made it ?

How was it made?

Links to GSA ?

Any other pieces in the archives that link to this ? Like pics or sketches ?

How and where did classes take place ?

Who taught these classes ?

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https://youtu.be/9seQ2JluhG0?si=NNhP9nOBFr3nWfbM

Appeared a millennia ago, was to pay respects to someone who has passed and for spiritual reasons.

Also for artist research tools, before photography (the use of this one?)

Mask room, in room 32 of the national portrait gallery

Contemporary art - Self by mark Quinn, he makes casts out of his blood and freezes them

makes a new iteration every 5 years with 10L of blood.

History :

We can go back 9000 years looking at Jericho head.

Then funerary masks, idealized version of the deceased

Tutankhamon’s mask, in Ancient Egypt it was to help person’s soul to recognize their body and come back to it.

Madame Tussaud’s. 1761, was a family of family executioners, doing moulages, she learned how to make death masks of guillotined heads.

Profession dominated by women!

Made life and death masks of the most infamous criminals of the day (like Burke and Hare).

Wild conclusions from masks, traits of criminals, like with pseudoscience. Measurement of lumps and bumps in skull, applied to race and class, attributed to Franz Gall. Casts of entire head : used for phrenology.

Face of unknown woman that drowned in Seine in 19th century “ CPR Annie”. Morgue attender thought she was so beautiful, wanted a mould of her face. Tradition of moulding her face after that, many people had it in their cabinet of curiosities. Lead to Someone commissioned to make CPR doll, inspired by mould his grandparents had.

They appear on tombstones.

Nick Reynolds, last artist making death masks in UK.

Face masks of death often of important men…

Gillian Wearing - interesting contemporary mask artist

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Gorvett, Zaria. The Lost Art of the Death Mask. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240209-the-lost-art-of-the-death-mask. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025.

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Gorvett, Zaria. The Lost Art of the Death Mask. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240209-the-lost-art-of-the-death-mask. Accessed 20 Oct. 2025.

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Learned that death masks emerged in Antiquity according to the BBC, initially were artworks for the rich, meant as protective armours that help the deceased navigate the afterlife, or ward off evil spirits. Later, in the Middle Ages, after the plague, these masks became a way to fossilise the features of deceased relatives, so that sculptors could have references for lifelike portraits displayed at funerals. In the 18th century, they became valued for their own sake. Then it became popular for immortalizing famous figures, and in with the surge of popularity of pseudoscience phrenology (facial measurements can predict human traits (meaning of bumps in skull)). Now they’re kind of out of fashion.

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/death-masks-famous-people/

About the process : Throughout history the method has stayed the same. The face of the corpse was lubricated and protected in gauze before clay or wax was applied to make an imprint on the deceased features.

Memento mori : remember you must die

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Phrenology and death Masks in the 19th century

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Phrenology and death Masks in the 19th century

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Phrenology is the study of the skull to determine someone's character. Its a famously victorian practice rooted in eugenism, colonialism, ableism and racism.

The Edinburgh Phrenological Society, founded in 1820 owned a large collection of death mask copies to use as research , maybe she was a research mask ?

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Phrenology in the 19th century | National Galleries of Scotland

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Explore the phrenology collection in the library at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

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https://www.sculpture.gla.ac.uk/mapping/public/view/person.php?id=msib1_1271968537

It was hard to find information on Charles Smith, but I managed to find some on his son:

The business operated from Kentish Town and Tufnell Park from about 1900-51. Between c.1900-12 the firm expanded into the sale of scholastic casts. Their stock was predominantly casts of architectural sculpture but also included some statues and statuettes. This side of the business lasted until the mid-1920s after which Charles James Junior and his brother, George Henry, worked for sculptors as plaster moulders until their deaths. Charles' clients included the sculptor, Charles Wheeler and he cast the death mask of George Bernard Shaw, 1950 (in the collection of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London).

Ok so, we now know that the family firm was involved in scholastic casts, which could indicate how it ended up in the GSA archive. It was also a business. Which makes me think rich people probably had orders as well. I guess the business stopped operating when photography became more accessible, and people could remember the deceased differently, and students found other ways to draw.

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Questions that arise :

Why was reddish-brown shellac used as a varnish?;

Why is the top half damaged and repaired with plaster?

What happened to the first version?

What were these death masks used for?

How did it end up in the GSA archive?

I have the feeling, this figure meant a lot to Smith, as he went through the process of repairing it, and it was the second version of a mask. The woman is unknown which makes us wonder what his connection was to her. Either he was interested in her after her death and didn’t know anything or much about her, or maybe he did know her but he couldn’t reveal her identity. I think the latter is more likely as he did 2 masks of her face. I also think the 1st version was probably in a worse state as the second one has already been repaired.

On the archives page we can read :

“Charles Smith was a plaster figure and sculptor's moulder in London active from at least 1886 until his death in 1918. After the death of Charles Smith, his sons, George Smith and Charles Smith Jr continued the business. The firm experienced financial difficulty in the 1920s, although the family continued to be involved in mould making and plaster casting until 1953.”

As this sculpture was made between 1886 and 1918, I think this was probably a test done by Smith as: she remains unnamed and at that period it was often of rich people, broken (yet repaired), or of someone he knew but wasn’t rich or famous.

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This object has been exhibited at “Dancing with a Ghost / Slow Show”, The Glasgow School of Art Annex Gallery (Stow Campus), Glasgow, 20 Jan – 28 Feb 2025”

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Looking at the ownership of 3D scans of heritage and artefacts 

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Looking at the ownership of 3D scans of heritage and artefacts 

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Overall, despite its potential, 3D technology does not fully keep the heritage safe and accessible but creates surrogates, whose copyright status is heavily determined by their originality and purpose. In the unlikely (but not impossible) event that new copyright emerges, there is now a new owner that controls the digital models. Given the push to digitise before repatriation and repeating recommendations on digitising heritage at risk, the ownership concerns need to be reassessed before rushing to digitise everything. Ultimately, 3D technology does not solve the questions of who ‘keeps’ the heritage, but it can create a new set of concerns over who ‘keeps’ the copies.

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Going digital at the National Waterways Museum

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A cutting-edge 3D rendering technique, known as photogrammetry, is helping us bring history to life at the National Waterways Museum in Cheshire.

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Another interesting piece on digital ownership and 3D Printing, a bit out of date 

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Another interesting piece on digital ownership and 3D Printing, a bit out of date 

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Schroeder also points out the danger of "digital colonialism," when institutions and museums 3D scan objects and then hold onto the images under copyright lock and key

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The Ethics Of 3D-Printing Syria’s Cultural Heritage

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In the field of cultural heritage, debate has surrounded the newly unveiled replica of Palmyra’s monumental Roman arch in New York City’s City Hall Park. Many question whether the 3D replica truly celebrates the antiquities of Syria and defies the destructive actions of ISIS, or is a form of ‘digital colonialism.’

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Face database

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Description

To facilitate more studies for developing face recognition methods that are effective and robust against low-resolution surveillance facial images, a new Surveillance Face Recognition challenge, QMUL-SurvFace, is introduced. This new challenge is the largest and more importantly the only true surveillance face recognition benchmark to our best knowledge, where low-resolution face images are native and not synthesised by artificial down-sampling of native high-resolution images. This challenge contains 463,507 face images of 15,573 distinct identities captured in real-world uncooperative surveillance scenes across wide space and time. Face recognition is generally more difficult in an open-set setting which is typical for surveillance person search scenarios, owing to an arbitrarily large number of non-target people (distractors) appearing over open space and unconstrained time.

News

Download

QMUL-SurvFace Dataset and Evaluation Codes (389MB): [ Google Drive] [ Baidu Cloud]

Citation

Surveillance Face Recognition Challenge. Zhiyi Cheng, Xiatian Zhu and Shaogang Gong. Technical Report, 2018.Paper Bibtex

We list below existing surveillance face recognition datasets. More extensive comparisons of face recognition datasets can be found in the paper.

UCCS Challenge: UCCS is a high-resolution surveillance face detection and recognition challenge. It contains 1,732 identities captured by a Canon 7D camera fitted with Sigma 800mm F5.6 EX APO DG HSM lens.

SCface Dataset: SCface is one of the earliest surveillance face recognition datasets. It consists of 4,160 static images (in visible and infrared spectrum) of 130 identities.

Licence

Notice that the QMUL-SurvFace challenge is made available for research purposes. All the images were collected from the existing person re-identification datasets, and the copyright belongs to the original owners.

Please feel free to send any questions, comments, and evaluation results with a brief method description to Zhiyi Cheng at z.cheng@qmul.ac.uk.

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qmul survface; 
         qmul surveillance face recognition challenge; qmul surveillance face challenge;
         qmul surveillance face recognition benchmark; qmul surveillance face benchmark;
         face recognition; surveillance face recognition; face identification; face verification; 
         open-set recognition; closed-set recognition; 
         native low-resolution; genuine low-resolution;
         true low-resolution; false low-resolution;
         artificial down-sampling; artificial sub-sampling; artificial low-resolution;
         very low-resolution; extreme low-resolution;
         low quality; low-quality; poor quality; poor-quality;
         super-resolution; high scale super-resolution;
         surveillance face; native face; poor quality faces; 
         large scale face search; large scale face matching; cross-camera matching;
         benchmark; computer vision;

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To facilitate more studies on developing face recognition models that are effective and robust for low-resolution surveillance facial images, we introduce a new Surveillance Face Recognition Challenge, which we call the QMUL-SurvFace benchmark. This new benchmark is the largest and more importantly the only true surveillance face recognition benchmark to our best knowledge, where low-resolution images are not synthesised by artificial down-sampling of native high-resolution images.

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p.166 : "Charles James Smith, was born at Pentonville,

London in 1848. His father, James, was variously described as: “an ornamental

stonework maker”" ,illiterate

The company provided for art schools teachings specifically.

p.174 : "Charles Smith had died in 1918 leaving his sons in charge of the firm.

By 1925 the commercial cast side of the business was failing."

p.175 : "Although George died in 1948, Charles seems to have continued the

business of sculptors’ moulders until 1953, by which time he was eighty (Fig.

8. 9). In 1950 he took the death mask of George Bernard Shaw and casts of

the playwright’s hands "

They had like 2k moulds

It seems they were making their own death masks.

It is not really known if they had unusual means of production and their most well known piece is a copy of the Keats death mask

How to set up successful casting company ?

p.167 : "To set up as a cast maker it was necessary to accumulate a large collection

of models. This was most effectively done by succeeding to the ownership of

a firm within which one had been employed. ", Also avoid overlap of models with other companies, need for novel casts.

Sourcing models

Before 1918

p.170 : " With the exception of some casts from nature and the odd piece from

abroad, most of the items in the first section were taken from English medie-

val small-scale sculpture. The accompanying descriptions often credit the

Architectural Museum, Tufton Street, Westminster"

Then from the Louvre and in France

Making Process

Gelatine moulds +

p.174" the process requires an outer shell,

thereby demanding as much storage space as a piece-mould and the cast thus

produced can only be as good as its starting point, namely the typecast, which

had usually been sanded smooth causing some loss of original surface."

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thinking about how it’s not about surveillance, more on anonymity in data,

in this case, public has a chance to decide what’s done with their image, which opposes surveillance and brings a more ‘optimist’ tone to facial recognition (nuance to topics that are overly-used in art and media right now, for good reason, but making art that gives agency to the public is a nice tone)

it’s not dehumanizing, just like the death masks were intended to pay homage to the person that died, or be used in a way to preserve the anonymity of the person (in respects to)

holding the data of the anonymous woman, is a way of remembering her, avoids “death” => vanishment

Celeste the link you put on contemporary works w greek statues, is very relevant to our project as, the exhibition helps the viewer recognize themselves in the artefact, which helps educate them in making them relate to the artefact more and be more intrigued on it.

I asked chat gpt how we could link death masks to facial data, in terms of anonymity :

From Death Mask to Data Mask

The act of anonymizing the face becomes a ritual of digital death — a memento mori reminding viewers that their data will outlive them, but not as they imagine.

🌫️ Bringing Anonymity Into the Work

Here are several layers — aesthetic, technological, and conceptual — that can express anonymity while resonating with the themes of death and remembrance:

A. Algorithmic Disfigurement (Counter-Surveillance Aesthetics)

After capturing each participant’s face:

Use real-time filters that obscure, fragment, or dissolve the image.

Possible styles:

3D mesh distortion (turns face into digital mask geometry).

Noise-based anonymization (pixelation, glitching, smudging).

Data ghosting (image fades into static or vapor-like textures).

Thermal silhouettes (turns face into temperature patterns, abstract and impersonal).

🔗 Reference: Adam Harvey’s CV Dazzle — designs that “confuse” recognition algorithms through fashion and makeup.

Conceptually, this is about reclaiming the face from machinic visibility — resisting the gaze of surveillance.

B. Death through Light

Since you mentioned projection — consider using light as both the medium and the destroyer:

A face is illuminated for a brief instant, then dissolves into pure light.

Or: the more the viewer looks, the faster the image decays — a digital vanitas effect.

Or: the projection becomes a negative — the participant’s face becomes a white void, an afterimage.

This reflects the ephemeral nature of the digital image and of life itself — “you are being captured as you vanish.”

C. The Anonymous Archive

Every face could be stored as non-identifiable fragments — data noise, numbers, coordinates.

The installation could display a growing archive of “lost identities” — a graveyard of data traces.

The title could evoke a morgue, ossuary, or reliquary — but rendered in pixels.

(Think Christian Boltanski’s installations of anonymous portraits.)

“We all die twice – once when we actually die and once when no one on earth recognizes our photograph.”

Each participant contributes a mask that immediately becomes unknowable, joining a collective digital memorial.

D. Participant Agency

To connect with the ritual aspect:

Participants could press a button or say a word to “anonymize” themselves — a voluntary digital death.

The moment they do, their image undergoes transformation — as if “casting” their death mask and letting it decay.

The interface can suggest control over one’s visibility, tying to resistance against surveillance capitalism.

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this quote by artist Christian Boltanski

“We all die twice – once when we actually die and once when no one on earth recognizes our photograph.”

So if we relate this to the experience design : by letting the viewer photograph their face (record their facial data without categorizing them or analyzing the data in any harmful way), their photograph gets recorded, then, either by having a 2D image morphed into 3D, losing its accuracy, or if ever we choose to modify the data for the exhibition, their photograph becomes unrecognizable, like the death masks we are using as a reference for rememberance of life (and death - memento mori). So in a way, they live forever in this interactive experience, remaining anonymous

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here it is