Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

It was in 1849, when Brunel’s Shakespeare Room came as near completion as it was ever
destined to be that the so-called Kesselstadt death mask was displayed at the British Museum.
The mask had been brought to London by a German artist from Darmstadt, Ludwig Becker.
Becker, having made it widely known that he was looking for the mask, which was said to have
belonged to Count Kesselstadt, duly found it in a broker’s shop in Mainz. 156 It was greeted with
great interest in London, met with a wide degree of acceptance and was shown at Stratford in
1864. Visitors for the rest of the nineteenth century could buy stereoscopic photographs of it. Its
status as an image of the Bard, or even as a death mask, was undermined, however, in the
twentieth century and it has failed to establish itself so successfully as the Birthplace. Yet the
story of its discovery, ripe with possibilities of deception and forgery between artists, brokers
and seekers after improbable truths, is so irresistibly reminiscent of the opening of Tales of the
Century that it must be accorded a place in any account of romantic antiquarianism.
156 See Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, pp. 468-70.
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