A PAINTED WOOD MUMMY PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN

ROMAN PERIOD, CIRCA 55-70 A.D.

Details

A PAINTED WOOD MUMMY PORTRAIT OF A WOMAN
ROMAN PERIOD, CIRCA 55-70 A.D.
Probably from Hawara, painted in encaustic, depicted in her youth in three-quarter right view, with a triangular face and a long neck, her complexion pale, with a pointed chin, thick eye brows, large eyes with heavy lids, a slender nose and a small mouth with full pink lips, her long black hair with snail-like curls arching across the forehead, obscuring her left ear and falling along her neck, wearing white disk-shaped earrings centered by emerald green, her bluish-white tunic with a dark blue clavus, a mantle perhaps draped over her left shoulder concealing the second clavus, on a cream background, preserving traces of the linen mummy wrappings along the upper and lower edges including a section, lower right, of layered lozenge patterning
15 5/8 in. (39.6 cm.) high

Provenance

Thierry Cambelong, Switzerland, 1970s.

Lot Essay

For a portrait depicting a young woman with the same hair style see the example in the Württembergische Landesmuseum, Stuttgart, no. 111 in Walker and Bierbrier, Ancient Faces, Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt. The style of the painting, palette and costume is close to a portrait of a woman in the British Museum, possibly by the same hand as the present example, no. 17, p. 43 op. cit. See also another portrait in Stuttgart, no. 110, p. 172 in Doxiadis, The Mysterious Fayum Portraits, Faces from Ancient Egypt.

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