Jean-Martin CHARCOT - Masque mortuaire de Cha... Lot n° 1021

Ultra rare since only this mask by master Jean-Martin Charcot is available for sale. Mortuary mask in plaster with brown patina. Golden yellow jaundice patina. Height: 31 cm, width 20 cm.  Charcot died on 16 August 1893 at Lac des Settons during a pleasure trip undertaken to rest from a tiring period of work with two of his pupils and friends, Isidor Straus and Debove. He was struck down by an oedema of the lung and died a few hours after the crisis. His friends are disarmed and shocked by the brutality of the attack. The mask was made by Charmet on the morning of the body's arrival in Paris, on 19 August 1893. Debove had asked Brouardel, the father of French forensic medicine and a pupil of Charcot's, for advice on how to make the mask. The latter immediately suggested Charmet to him. He wanted to follow the Master's requirements of authenticity. Brouardel had told him "if you ask the others, they will naturally call Richer", to which Debove had retorted that he wanted to have a mask of the Master as it had been and not an embellished and magnified artefact.  Paul Richer, neurologist, professor of fine arts, was the "plastician" of the Salpêtrière school. When Charcot had wanted to be elected to the Academy, the custom was for a doctor to attend the Academy, having been awarded, among his titles and works, artistic and literary publications, testifying to a humanist sensitivity, it was to Richer that he had turned to write his two publications on the grotesque, the deformed in art.  French neurology was then the first in the world and Charcot, the most eminent doctor on this earth, the Tsar, the American tycoons, the first multimillionaires, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, everyone was rushing to his home. The battle raged around the old master, to take his succession, Déjerine, Pierre Marie, mortal enemies at the Faculty, Alix Joffroy at Sainte-Anne, Brissaud in ambush. Debove and Straus, though personal fri