Wax Portraits

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WAX PORTRAITS

WAX PORTRAITS. The first American wax modeler, Patience Lovell Wright, made portraits of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Later, just after the American Revolution, itinerant modelers traveled the northern Atlantic coast. Johan Christian Rauschner and George M. Miller made many miniatures in varicolored wax, often jeweled, portraying the more prominent local worthies and their wives. Daniel Bowen copied Wright's Washington moderately well. Robert Ball Hughes of Boston modeled delicately in white wax. Giuseppi Volaperta made reliefs of three presidents in red wax. Reuben Moulthorpe of Connecticut molded heads in the round and made waxworks.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bolton, Ethel Stanwood. American Wax Portraits. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929.

———. Wax Portraits and Silhouettes. Boston: Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America, 1914.

Ethel StanwoodBolton/a. r.

See alsoArt: Sculpture ; Art: Self-Taught Artists .