Learning from Curtius
Marie Grosholtz learned to model in wax from Philippe Curtius, a physician skilled in the craft, and followed him to Paris with her mother. Her first figure, of the writer Voltaire, dates from 1777.
Through the Revolution
During the French Revolution she was imprisoned for three months, and she made wax models of many of its prominent victims. In 1794 she inherited Curtius’s collection, and the following year she married François Tussaud.
A home in Baker Street
Unable to return to France during the Napoleonic Wars, she toured Great Britain and Ireland before settling in London, where her museum in Baker Street had opened by 1835. Museums carrying her name now open in cities around the world.



