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_.”