August, 1 9 13 



AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 293 



Contemporary wax portrait 

 by Ethel Frances Mundy 



Wax 

 Portraiture 



By Gardner Teall 

 Photographs by T. C. Turner and Others 



Contemporary wax portrait 

 by Ethel Frances Mundy 



TRANGE it seems that so many fragile ob- Wax portraiture is one of the arts of the past so little 



jects have come down to us from antiquity known to many collectors, that examples of it are not often 



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 cen- 

 turies of vicissitudes, one cannot but 

 reflect upon the extraordinary for- 

 tune of things apparently so perish- 

 able. The visitor to the South 

 Kensington (Albert and Victoria) 

 Museum in London often expresses 

 astonishment on beholding little wax 

 models that have come down 

 through hundreds of years, or, when 

 discovering a portrait of Michel- 

 angelo molded in wax relief by 

 Michelangelo's intimate, Leone 

 Leoni, which now reposes in the 

 British Museum, wonders that Time 



Wax portrait of the Due de Montesquieu from the 

 collection of Charles Allen Munn 



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 ex- 

 tant, 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 col- 

 ored wax, and this is the earliest use 

 of the medium in color mentioned 



has lent so kind a hand to things which were constructed by history. Works of this sort were forerunners to the 

 of materials that we have regarded as being so perishable, later colored wax portraits of the seventeenth and of the 



Two wax portraits from the collection of Charles Allen Munn. That to the left is in colored wax, and that to the right in white wax, is of David 



Carrick by Isaac Gosset 



