For examples of Greek portrait painting we are indebted to Egypt, that country whose climate has preserved so much that elsewhere would have perished.  It will be remembered that Egypt, having been conquered by Alexander, fell after his death to the lot of his general, Ptolemy, and continued to be ruled by Ptolemy’s descendants until, in 30 B.C., it became a Roman province.  During the period of Macedonian rule Alexandria was the chief center of Greek culture in the world, and Greeks and Greek civilization became established also in the interior of the country; nor did these Hellenizing influences abate under Roman domination.  To this late period, when Greek and Egyptian customs ere largely amalgamated, belongs a class of portrait heads which have been found in the Fayyurn, chiefly within the last ten years.  They are painted on panels of wood (or rarely on canvas), and were originally attached to mummies.  The embalmed body was carefully wrapped in linen bandages and the portrait placed over the face and secured in position.  These pictures are executed principally by the encaustic process, though some use was made also of tempera.  The persons represented appear to be of various races—­ Greek, Egyptian, Hebrew, negro, and mixed; perhaps the Greek type predominates in the specimens now known.  At any rate, the artistic methods of the portraits seem to be purely Greek.  As for their date, it is the prevailing opinion that they belong to the second century after Christ and later, though an attempt has been made to carry the best of them back to the second century B.C.

The finest collection of these portraits is one acquired by a Viennese merchant, Herr Theodor Graf.  They differ widely in artistic merit; our illustrations show three of the best.  Fig. 194 is a man in middle life, with irregular features, abundant, waving hair, and thin, straggling beard.  One who has seen Watts’s picture of “The Prodigal Son” may remark in the lower part of this face a likeness to that.  Fig. 195 is a charming girl, wearing a golden wreath of ivy-leaves about her hair and a string of great pearls about her neck.  Her dark eyes look strangely large, as do those of all the women of the series; probably the effect of eyes naturally large was heightened, as nowadays in Egypt, by the practice of blackening the edges of the eyelids.  Fig. 196 is the most fascinating face of all, and it is artistically unsurpassed in the whole series.  This and a portrait of an elderly man, not given here, are the masterpieces of the Graf collection.  It is much too little to say of these two heads that they are the best examples of Greek painting that have come down to us.  In spite of the great inferiority of the encaustic technique to that of oil painting, these pictures are not unworthy of comparison with the great portraits of modern times.

The ancient wall-paintings found in and near Rome. but more especially in Pompeii, are also mostly Greek in character, so far as their best qualities are concerned.  The best of them, while betraying deficient skill in perspective, show such merits in coloring, such power of expression and such talent for composition, as to afford to the student a lively enjoyment and to intensify tenfold his regret that Zeuxis and Parrhasius, Apelles and Protogenes, are and will remain to us nothing but names.