WAX PORTRAITS
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 Phœnician 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:
You may have my most grateful thanks for your kind attention to my
son in taking him into your Family to encourage his genii and
giving him the pleasing oppourtunity of taking a Likeness that has
I sincerely hope gave his country and your friends, Sir,
satisfaction. I am impatient to have a copy of what he has done
that I may have the honour of making a model from it in wax work,
as it has been for some time the wish and desire of my heart to
model a likeness of General Washington.
To this Washington replied:
If the bust which your son has modelled of me should reach your
hands and afford your genii any employment that can amuse Mrs.
Wright it must be an honour done me.
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:
In order to show how wax is modeled let us first speak of the
working of wax and not of clay. To render it softer a little animal
fat and turpentine and black pitch are put into the wax, and of
these ingredients it is the fat that makes it more supple, the
turpentine adds tenacity, and the pitch gives it the black color
and consistency, so that after it has been worked and left to stand
it will become hard.
This was the wax probably used for the backgrounds. Vasari continues:
And he who would wish to make wax of another color may easily do so
by putting into it red earth or vermilion or red lead; he will thus
make it yellowish red or some shade; if he add verdigris, green,
and so on with the other colors. But well it is to observe that the
colors should be powdered and sifted, and in this condition mixed
with the wax afterward and made as soft as possible. The wax is
also made white for small things--medals, portraits, minute scenes,
and other objects in bas-relief. All this is accomplished by mixing
white lead that has already been powdered with the white wax as
already explained. I must not neglect to mention that modern
artists have discovered the method of working all sorts of colors
into the wax so that in taking portraits from life in half-relief
they make the flesh tints, the hair, the clothes and all so
lifelike that these presentments appear to lack only the power to
speak.