Henry Cros

Henry Cros is best known as a sculptor and glassmaker, the man who revived pâte de verre, a way of moulding coloured glass paste known since antiquity. He also belongs among painters, because colour was his lifelong subject. From 1867 he experimented with tinted wax and with encaustic, the old method of painting with hot wax, and in 1884 he published a treatise on it.

The Prize of the Tournament, shown at the Salon of 1873, is one of about 20 waxes he made in those years, a painted relief partly gilded and set with pearls, in the bright manner of the Middle Ages. The French state bought it after the exhibition, and it is now in the Musée d'Orsay. Born in Narbonne, Cros was the brother of Charles Cros, poet and inventor. In 1883, after seeing two glass-paste medallions in the Louvre, he began his own glass experiments, and in 1891 the state gave him a studio at the Sèvres porcelain factory.