36 
House & Garden 
WAX MINIATURES ARE HERE A G A I N 
Another Old Art Has Been Revived and Once More Takes Its Place in Port) aiture 
■—I low the Miniatures Are Made and JJ hat They Are Like 
EMILY BURBANK 
J T is again the chic thing to have one’s 
portrait done in wax. The revival 
of this old art is one more sign indi¬ 
cating that the tide of taste has turned 
in favor of beauty, grace and a delicacy 
of tone and touch characteristic of the 
18th Century. The world appears to 
be reacting from a long period of realism 
which in art has often emphasized the 
ugly, the abrupt and the vivid. 
Interior decoration was prompt to 
declare for this ISth Century mood by 
a revival of the Directoire type in 
furnishings and decoration. The read¬ 
ing public and the publisher, the thea¬ 
tre-goer and the manager, are satiated 
with the brand the hallmark of which 
is “punch,” and are on the lookout for 
this new-old key to be struck in books 
and plays. 
As for books and the stage, we shall 
see. But the waxes are here and some 
of them are shown on these pages, the 
modern ones all being the work of the 
foremost artist in this field, Miss Ethel 
Mundy. Miss Mundy is an American, 
well known to connoisseurs at home 
and abroad. Her sitters live in many 
parts of the United States, as the illus¬ 
trations show. 
It was the well-known collection in 
the Musee Cluny, at Paris, that first 
cast a spell over Miss Mundy, who had 
been trained in some of the foremost 
American art schools of modeling and 
painting. She tells how day after day 
she returned to the waxes in the Cluny— 
waxes by Benoits, Clouet, Dupre and the rest 
—of the fascination that the great Conde and 
Louis XIV, done in wax, had for her. Finally, 
she bought a tiny steel scapula and felt she 
had taken the first definite step in her career. 
From Paris Miss Mundy went to 
London, where she studied the Wallace 
collection of waxes, the foremost in the 
world. There she saw all schools and 
every country represented: waxes in 
low and high relief, wax statuettes, 
pure white waxes like those of John 
Flaxman, and portrait reliefs by 
S. Percy. Among the latter were Na¬ 
poleon, the Empress Josephine, others 
of the Bonaparte family, Marie An¬ 
toinette and Murat. In London, too, 
were ancient Egyptian wax portrait 
panels, a miniature of Michael Angelo 
done from life in reddish yellow wax, 
James I in a wax relief, three-quarter- 
face pose, done in colors by the Italian 
Alessandro Abandio. The great Pitt 
was there, in pink wax! But the 18th 
Century type of waxes in delicate col¬ 
oring following Nature had the greatest 
charm. There were exquisite statuettes 
of Sir Peter and Lady Teazle (un¬ 
signed), true to type and time, in satins 
and flowered silks, lace frills, powder 
and patches, snuff-box—even elaborate 
manner. 
Infinite variety of manner and 
method was there to choose from, and 
Miss Mundy at once began experi¬ 
ments with wax and color. Together 
with an expert chemist she worked out 
a secret formula, a wax which does not 
melt, and colors which do not run or 
act chemically upon each other. Here, 
too, she trod the royal road of her pre¬ 
decessors, for each great artist in wax 
has had his own formula, the secret of which 
died with him, adding to both the difficulties 
and the fascination of this art. For instru¬ 
ments she had, besides the steel scapula from 
Paris, tiny tools which she made from orange 
An Italian 
18th Century 
miniature of 
a gentleman 
of the court. 
M etropolitan 
Museum of 
Art 
(Left) Por¬ 
trait of a Girl, 
one of Miss 
Mundy’s re¬ 
vivals of the 
old art of 
modeling in 
colored wax 
Little Miss Natalie Mae Coe has been de¬ 
picted within a simple round frame. These 
wax portraits are remarkable for their fidel¬ 
ity to line, features and coloring, and are 
distinctly original 
Marjory and Her Mother show clearly the 
strikingly effective way in which the figures 
are built up into a relief that reproduces 
every shadow and detail of cloth, hair and 
facial expression 
Miss Merl Whitcomb, a Schoolgirl, is an¬ 
other effective modern wax miniature. 
These three examples at the bottom of the 
page were executed in colors by Miss Mundy 
and are representative of her work 
