Waxworks Wednesday

Flashback Wednesday to my visit to the Waxworks at Mtatsminda Park in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 2017, and the Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in Washington DC, on 14th Street in 2013. Both display a selection of life-sized figures of celebrities, sporting figures, politicians, and presidents.

Anna Maria Grosholtz (1761-1850, born in France, worked for Dr Philippe Curtius, a physician and wax sculptor in Paris. His first exhibition of waxworks was shown in 1770 was a French artist who sculpted figures in wax. In 1777 Anna Maria created her first wax figure of Voltaire. When Curtius died in 1794 he left his collection to Anna Maria. She married Francois Tussaud and moved to London, where she established a Wax Museum in Baker Street in 1835. Her museum has expanded to branches in Amsterdam, Bangkok, Sydney, Hong Kong, Las Vegas, Shanghai, Berlin, Washington DC, New York, and Hollywood.

In Washington DC, the photographs show: Fidel Castro, Julia Roberts, Larry King, Martin Luther King, Mohammad Ali, Morgan Freeman, and Sir Winston Churchill. The Mtatsminda Park Waxworks in Tbilisi, Georgia show photographs of Avatar, Joseph Stalin, Marlene Dietrich, Sir Elton John, Antonio Banderas, Luciano Pavarotti, Lady Gaga, Mick Jagger, Albert Einstein, Robert Kennedy, Barak Obama, Peter the Great, Che Guevara, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Neanderthal man.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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