Is This Walt Whitman’s Death Mask?
Research into this photo leads me to believe so!
Whitman and Thomas Eakins lived across the Delaware River from each other and were good friends sharing an appreciation of the human body. Eakins did several portraits of the aging Whitman who once said Eakins “is not a painter but a force.” The morning after the poet died Eakins and his student/friend Samuel Murray (seen here sculpting) traveled from Philly to Camden, NJ to take Whitman’s death mask.
With this knowledge I simply googled “Walt Whitman death mask” and the first link brought me to an object record at Harvard’s Houghton Library for a bust cast from a death mask credited to, you guessed it, Eakins and Murray. Given that this photo is from 1900, the two men’s friendship, and the bearded face hovering in the background I feel reasonably safe making the argument that this is, in fact, Walt Whitman’s death mask. Simultaneously really cool and really morbid.
Although, given my favorite section of "Song of Myself” I think Whitman would have seen his mask and its preservation in photographic form as entirely appropriate. It is in a mechanical sense (versus Whitman’s natural one) a form of rebirth and immortality. “There is really no death” only a transformation into a new substance. For what is the purpose of a death mask or a portrait or a photograph than to preserve something of the self beyond death?
“What do you think has become of the young and old men? What do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere; The smallest sprouts show there is really no death, And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it, And ceased the moment life appeared.
All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses, And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”
(Thomas Eakins. Samuel Murray Sculpting Frank St. John. 1900. Gelatin Print. Bryn Mawr College.)
( “A child said, What is the grass?” from "Song of Myself”, Walt Whitman)
