El-Fayum portrait of a lady. Ancient Egypt, Er-Rubayat period, P. Romano, ca. 121-245 AD.
Wood and pigments.
In good state of preservation.
Carbon 14 test attached.
Provenance:
- Found in er-Rubaiyat, Egypt, before 1903.
- Theodor Graf (1840-1903), Vienna.
- Private collection of engineer Claes A. Philip (1912-2000, Sweden), acquired by inheritance. He was a passionate collector of antiques, old paintings, Asian works of art, European furniture and decorative arts. His eclectic home was spectacularly presented in Trollesund Säteri until 1965, thereafter at his home in Stockholm. Behind the frame is a label as an exlibris of the collection, as well as a handwritten note cataloguing the piece.
Enclosed are old photographs of the piece in the collector's home, as well as a copy of the collection's inventory page with the piece.
Publications:
-PARLASCA, Klaus. Ritratti di Mummie. Repertorio d'arte dell'Egitto Greco-Roman. Volume IV. Rome. Series B.N.823 fig. 3.
Size: 34 x 17.5 cm.
The present panel was part of the first collection of portraits of El Fayum assembled by the Viennese antiquarian Theodor Graff in the late 1880s, an important compilation that introduced this genre of portraiture to the Western world. Theodor Graff was a carpet and art dealer who, in 1887, acquired more than 300 portraits of mummies such as the one presented here. He exhibited the pieces in various places in Europe and America to great public acclaim, selling them to various institutions and private collectors. The success of his collection led him to supply portraits to the most important international museums, from the British Museum in London to the Metropolitan in New York.
The Fayum portraits are realist-style paintings on wood that originally covered the faces of mummies from the Roman province of Egypt. They are part of the tradition of panel painting, a highly respected discipline in the classical world, and are the only major ensemble of this tradition that has survived to the present day. It was continued in the Byzantine and Western traditions of the post-classical world, including Egyptian Coptic iconography.
They have been found throughout Egypt, but are most common in the Fayum region, and date from the Roman period, from the 1st century BC onwards. Although it is not known for certain when their production ended, research suggests that it was around the middle of the 3rd century. Often, given the realism of these portraits, they can be dated by the type of hairstyle, jewellery or clothing.
These portraits covered the faces of mummified bodies, complementing the traditional cartonnage of Egyptian mummies. They usually depict a single person, showing the face or head and upper torso, always with a frontal view. Stylistically, these images are directly inherited from the Greco-Latin tradition rather than the Egyptian one. In fact, the population of the Fayum area grew considerably as a result of a wave of Greek immigration during the Hellenistic period.
In terms of technique, there are two groups of portraits: those painted in encaustic, using wax, and those painted in tempera, although they are always on wood.
These works are of exceptional historiographical interest as they illustrate the meeting point between Greek painting, Roman realist portraiture and Ancient Egyptian religion. In fact, the Egyptians believed that their funerary portraits should be as realistic as possible so that they could be clearly recognised after death.