The collection of foreign paintings in the National Museum of Cuba contains many pieces of exceptional quality and affords an opportunity for both specialists and the general public to acquaint themselves with the evolution of art and various countries. Presented in this album is but a part of the works housed in the Museum and it is only upon the most significant among them that we shall dwell here.

The earliest paintings in the entire collection are the so-called Fayum portraits done in wax paints (encaustic) on panel. This art, which evokes the same admiration in present-day viewers as it did in its contemporaries, was born in Egypt in the Roman period. The Fayum portrait not only witnessed to the high social position of the person depicted, but was meant to perpetuate him in the next world as well.

The National Museum of Cuba has nine such portraits dating the second to the fourth centuries. The earliest of these is Portrait of a Man  painted between 140 and 180 A.D. There is a wary, cautious look in the man’s eyes, and it is conveyed in a more realistic manner than that of the woman’s in another portrait.