Portraits in Plaster, from the Collection of Laurence Hutton

Transcriber’s Note
EDWIN BOOTH
FROM
THE COLLECTION
LAURENCE HUTTON
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1894
Copyright, 1894, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
The story of the beginning of my collection of masks is curious and perhaps interesting. The half-dozen casts upon which it is based were found, early in the Sixties, in a dust-bin in one of the old-fashioned streets which run towards the East River, in the neighborhood of Tompkins Square, New York. Their owner had lately died; his unsympathetic and unappreciative heirs had thrown away what they considered “the horrible things;” a small boy had found them, and offered them for sale to a dealer in phrenological casts, who realized their worth, although, in many cases, he did not know whose heads they represented; and so, by chance, they came into my possession, and inspired the search for more.
The history of these masks which formed the nucleus of the collection, or the history of the original collector himself, I have never been able to discover. They are, however, the casts most frequently described in the printed lectures of George Combe, who came to America in the winter of 1838-39, and the inference is that they were left here by him in the hands of one of his disciples.