That the little misses of olden times managed at so tender an age to produce such handiwork seems almost amazing. Little girls of five and six years achieved marvels in sampler stitchery as extant examples abundantly proves.
Poetry and samplers seem to have been good friends. In the second scene of the third act of “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and in the fourth scene of the second act of “Titus Andronicus,” Shakspere alludes to samplers. So does Milton in “Comus,” and Sir Philip Sidney in “Arcadia.” If those blest bards could but scan the verse of some of the sampler-makers! Here is one which, in its way, is a gem typical of task and talent:
Sarah Bonney is
My Name, England is
My Nation; See How Good
My Parents is to Give
Me Education
There is rhyming for you! And may we not imagine that beneath those sentiments lurked a fine humor?
CHAPTER IX
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.