The Encaustic Revival

Encaustic painting is old enough that the oldest surviving examples are funerary objects. The Fayum mummy portraits — roughly 900 panel paintings produced in Roman Egypt between the 1st century BCE and the 3rd century CE — are painted in pigmented beeswax applied while molten and fused with heat. They have survived for two thousand years without yellowing, without cracking, without the surface degradation that destroys most ancient paintings. The British Museum holds some. So does the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre, and the Pushkin in Moscow. They are astonishing objects, not primarily because they are old but because they are so immediate — faces rendered with enough specificity that they feel like portraits of actual people, not types.

Pliny the Elder described the technique in his *Naturalis Historia*, written around 77 CE, as the medium of the great Greek painters — Apelles, Zeuxis, Nicomachus. He called it *enkaustikos*, meaning "to burn in." The burning-in step is definitional: after each layer of wax is applied, a heat source is passed over the surface to fuse that layer to the one beneath. Without the fusing, layers can delaminate. With it, the painting becomes an object of unusual physical density, built up through accumulated decisions that can't easily be undone but can always be reworked by reheating.

The medium largely disappeared after the 4th century CE. Egg tempera replaced it in the Byzantine and medieval periods. The specific workshop knowledge required to maintain the heat tools, source the beeswax-damar resin mixture, and work at a consistent temperature across a large surface was lost gradually rather than all at once. By the Renaissance, encaustic was a curiosity described in ancient texts rather than a working method.

The accident that changed things

Jasper Johns didn't set out to revive a historical medium. In 1954 or 1955, depending on which account you follow, he started painting *Flag* — a work that is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art — in encaustic on newspaper collage laid over fabric and plywood. He has said in interviews that the encaustic was partly pragmatic: it dried fast enough that he could work continuously, building up layers without waiting. Oil paint would have blended; the wax held the mark.

What he got was more than he expected. The semi-transparency of the beeswax allowed the newspaper underneath to show through — text and image visible beneath the surface of the flag, the painted surface and the substrate in a relationship that oil on canvas could not produce. *White Flag* (1955), now at the Metropolitan Museum, is the most extreme version of this: a large encaustic work in which the flag image is barely distinguishable from the newspaper ground, everything pale and slightly submerged. *Three Flags* (1958), which the Whitney Museum purchased for $1 million in 1980 — at the time a record for a living American artist — stacks three canvases in diminishing sizes, each painted in encaustic, the physical accumulation of the medium making the canvases themselves thick, object-like.

Johns was not working from the Fayum portraits or from Pliny. His rediscovery was independent. But the effect was to reintroduce encaustic to American artists as a viable contemporary medium at exactly the moment when questions about surface, image, and materiality were central to American painting. The medium arrived with the right conceptual associations at the right historical moment.

The community that formed around it

The broader practitioner revival took another generation. Joanne Mattera's *The Art of Encaustic Painting*, published by Watson-Guptill in 2001, is the text most often cited as the beginning of the medium's wider accessibility — the first modern manual to address both the technical process and the contemporary practice landscape. Mattera's own paintings are geometric abstractions that use the medium's luminosity as the central visual fact: the way beeswax holds light differently from paint on canvas, the way layers create a sense of depth that is literally physical rather than illusionistic.

R&F Handmade Paints, founded by Richard Frumess in Kingston, New York, has been the supply-side engine of the contemporary revival. Their standardization of professional-grade encaustic paint formulas in the 1980s made the medium available to artists who couldn't or wouldn't mix their own beeswax-damar-pigment recipes from scratch. Without that standardization, the revival would have stayed in the hands of specialists.

Tony Scherman, a Canadian painter who died in 2021, used encaustic differently than almost anyone else working in the medium. His Napoleon series — begun in the late 1980s and continued for years — depicted scenes from the Napoleonic Wars in heavily worked wax that was layered, scraped back, partially obscured, and reworked repeatedly. The resulting images feel both monumental and corroded, as if seen through fog or through bad memory. The National Gallery of Canada holds significant work from this series. Scherman was not interested in the medium's luminosity; he was interested in what happens to an image when you keep working it past the point of legibility.

The Encaustic Art Institute in Santa Fe, founded by painter Michael David, became another hub — workshops, residencies, and an exhibition program oriented around large-scale work in a medium that resists scale. Maintaining even temperature across a six-foot panel is technically difficult; David's own paintings make that difficulty visible as part of the work's meaning.

What the medium actually does

The properties that keep bringing artists to encaustic are not mysterious. Beeswax is semi-translucent, so light penetrates the surface and reflects back from within — a quality painters describe as luminosity, and which is genuinely unlike what oil paint or acrylic produces. Layers accumulate and remain visible; the painting carries its own revision history in a way you can literally see, which is conceptually interesting to anyone working with time, memory, or accumulation as subject matter. Objects — photographs, paper, fabric, text — can be embedded between layers, suspended in wax, neither fully present nor fully absent. The surface can be polished to a glassy smoothness or built up into relief-like texture within the same work.

It also demands physical presence in a way that makes some artists resistant to it and others devoted. The painter has to be at the heated palette, responding to the cooling wax, developing an embodied sense of temperature and timing that can't be approximated theoretically. There are artists for whom this is the entire point — a medium that pushes back, that has to be negotiated rather than directed.

What the contemporary revival established, somewhat quietly, is that encaustic is not a specialty medium or a historical curiosity but a working option for painters who have reasons to use it. The Fayum portraits established that it lasts. Johns established that it could carry contemporary meaning. The community that formed around Mattera and R&F established that it could be taught, standardized, and practiced at scale. Whether that's enough to sustain its current presence in gallery programs and museum collections is a question the market will answer slowly. The medium has outlasted empires before.