File:American homes and gardens (1913) (14598499099).jpg

Identifier: americanhomesga101913newy (find matches)
Title: American homes and gardens
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors:
Subjects: Architecture, Domestic Landscape gardening
Publisher: New York : Munn and Co
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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it of the Due de Montesquieu from thecollection of Charles Allen Munn met with in American collections.Ancient writers have given us a hintof the antiquity of wax portraiture,not only in round sculpture but inrelief. Moreover, we know thatthe Greek artists in Egypt wereadepts in painting portraits bymeans of powdered colors appliedwith rush brushes to slabs of cedar-wood covered with wax, into whichcoating the color could easily beworked when the suns rays werepermitted to soften the wax. Manyof these ancient wax panels are ex-tant, and they appear very muchlike paintings in oil colors uponwood. We know that Lysistratus, wholived in the time of Alexander theGreat, executed small busts in col-ored wax, and this is the earliest useof 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 theof materials that we have regarded as being so perishable, later colored wax portraits of the seventeenth and of the
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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 294 AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS August, 1913 eighteenth century, with the old custom, which Pliny men- No material is more responsive to the artists touch than tions, of ancestral portraits in the households of the old wax, immortalizing as it does his individual handling in aRomans as connecting links in the progress of the art. manner peculiarly its own. Perhaps no English wax port- Moreover, the Romans were wont to carry infuneral processions waxen portraits of the departed,a curious custom clinging to civilization as late asthe seventeenth century in England. Indeed, a vis-itor to Westminster Abbey may see the old waxform of Queen Elizabeth,gorgeously attired, which wascarried in the cortege at herburial. More cheerful, on theother hand, are the marvelouswax portraits in relief (somewhite or monochrome, andothers co

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