STRANGE it seems that so many fragile objects have come down to us from antiquity while cities of stone, statues of marble, and monuments of bronze too often have appeared lost forever. On beholding a perfect glass vase whose history dates back to Phoenician times, but which has survived centuries of vicissitudes, one cannot but reflect upon the extraordinary fortune of things apparently so perishable. In the Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington, London, the museum of the Art Department of Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere one may find little wax models that have come down through hundreds of years, and one wonders that Time has lent so kind a hand to things which were constructed of materials that we have regarded as being so perishable.

Wax portraiture is one of the arts of the past so little known to many collectors that examples of it are not often met with in American collections. Ancient writers have given us a hint of the antiquity of wax portraiture, not only in round sculpture, but in relief. Moreover, we know that the Greek artists in Egypt were adepts in painting portraits by means of powdered colors applied with rush brushes to slabs of cedar-wood covered with wax, into which coating the color could easily be worked when the sun’s rays were permitted to soften the wax. Many of these ancient wax panels are extant, and they appear very much like paintings in oil colors upon wood.

We know that Lysistratus, who lived in the time of Alexander the Great, executed small busts in colored wax, and this is the earliest use of the medium in color mentioned by history. Works of this sort were forerunners of the later colored wax portraits of the seventeenth and of the eighteenth century, with the old custom, which Pliny mentions, of having ancestral portraits in the households of the Romans as connecting links in the progress of the art. Moreover, the Romans were wont to carry in funeral procession waxen portraits of the departed, as a curious custom clinging to civilization as late as the seventh century in England. Indeed, a visitor to Westminster Abbey may see the old wax form of Queen Elizabeth gorgeously attired, which was carried in the cortÈge at her burial!

More cheerful, on the other hand, are the remarkable wax portraits in relief—some white or monochrome and others colored—which were modeled (“painted” would perhaps be a better word) by the early artists of the cinquecento—Leone Leoni, Antonio Abondio in Italy, later by Guillaume DuprÉ and Antoine Benoit in France, and then by Isaac Gosset, Eley, George Mountstephen, Joachim Smith, S. Percy, and Peter Ruow and others in England.

How the ancients prepared their materials for working in wax is not recorded, but probably they anticipated all of the processes employed by the medieval artist in such portraiture, powdering the color, mixing in oil, and adding it to pure wax in the state of fusion. To Pastorino of Siena has been accredited the honor of having invented the particular wax paste used by himself and his successors in representing the hair and the skin.

In the sixteenth century the art of wax portraiture was practised in Nuremberg and reached a high state of development under Casper Hardy, prebendary of the Cologne cathedral.

Among the most interesting wax portraits by French artists are those from the hand of FranÇois Clouet, in the sixteenth century, which are among the treasures of the Cluny Museum, Paris. Under Louis XIV wax portraiture attained so important a place in France that we find Antoine Benoit given the royal appointment of “Unique sculpteur en cire colorÉe.”

No material is more responsive to the artist’s touch than wax, immortalizing as it does his individual handling in a manner peculiarly its own. Perhaps no English portraitist has given evidence of greater ability than did S. Percy, whose wax portraits, as well as those by Peter Ruow, are prized by collectors. Artists in wax portraiture were not unknown in America during colonial times. Among the names of early wax-portrait artists in America that of Patience Wright stands forth prominently. She was born in 1725, the daughter of Mr. Lowell, a Quaker of Bordentown, New Jersey. When twenty-three years of age she married Joseph Wright, and some years later was left a widow with three children. In 1772 she went to England. Already she had become noted for her excellent work in portraiture. A bust of Thomas Penn was one of her earliest works of the London period and the wax-portrait of Washington from her hand, modeled after an original from life by her son, Joseph Wright, is now in the possession of Dr. Richard H. Harte of Philadelphia. This is the work which she mentions in a letter to Washington preserved in the Library of Congress:

To this Washington replied:

Wax portraiture almost died out in the nineteenth century, but it is of interest to note its recent revival by Ethel Frances Mundy and other skilful artists.

Good old Giorgio Vasari, the gossipy chronicler of the Old Masters to whom we owe nearly all of our knowledge of the lives of the early Italian painters, wrote an interesting treatise on the technique of art from which the following is quoted, as being of further interest to the collector of wax portraits:

This was the wax probably used for the backgrounds. Vasari continues: