MARSHALL, William Edgar, artist, born in New York city, 30 June, 1837. At the age of twenty-one he began bank-note engraving, at which he worked for several years, and then turned his attention to the engraving of larger plates in line. A few years later he went to Boston and painted many portraits, including that of Oliver Wendell Holmes. He went abroad in 1864, and remained in Europe about two years, living mostly in Paris, where he painted portraits and exhibited in the salons of 1865-'6. On his return he began to engrave again, chiefly portraits. Having executed a head of Christ, after Da Vinci, for Henry Ward Beecher's "Life of Jesus" (1871), he conceived the plan of painting an ideal head of Christ that would please him better than those hitherto produced. He first modelled the head in clay, and made also a cartoon sketch that met with much praise, and in 1880 he produced his "Head of Christ," of colossal proportions. Of this he also executed a very large line engraving. Mr. Marshall is best known by his portrait engravings, of which the admirable heads of Washington (1862), Lincoln (1866), and Grant (1868) were especially successful. He made six portraits of General Grant, the last one (considered by the artist the best) just before the general's death. Among others whose portraits he engraved were Henry W. Longfellow, James G. Blaine. Winfield S. Hancock, James A. Garfield, Henry Ward Beecher, and James Fenimore Cooper. Most of the engravings were after paintings by himself.