Portrait of a Woman
Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt, The Detroit Institute of Arts, March 22-April 30, 1967, no. 11.
Echoes of Eternity: The Egyptian Mummy and the Afterlife, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, June 4, 1999-May 7, 2000.
The portrait is arresting: her wide eyes, framed and emphasized by her heavy brows, stare out at the viewer as though she is alive today.
The artist painted it using the encaustic technique. Mixing organic colors in hot beeswax, he applied the hot paint to a specially prepared wooden board. One Greek writer, the so-called Pseudo-Plutarch, appropriately commented:
A beautiful woman leaves in the heart of an indifferent man an image as fleeting as a painting on water. In the heart of a lover, this image is fixed with fire like an encaustic painting, which time can never erase.
Antinoopolis, Egypt [1];
With Spink & Son, London, by September 14, 1937;
Purchased from Spink & Son by Brummer Gallery, Paris and New York, stock no. P14058, September 14, 1937-November 18, 1937 [2];
Purchased from Brummer, through Harold Woodbury Parsons, by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1937.
NOTES:
[1] See Klaus Parlasca, Repertorio d’arte dell’Egitto greco-romano , ser. B, vol. 1 (Rome: "L'Erma" di Bretschneider, 1969), 87 and David Lowell Thompson, “The Classes and Hands of Painted Funerary Portraits from Antinoopolis” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1972), 51ff.
[2] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Cloisters Library and Archive, Brummer Gallery Records, Egyptian, Object inventory card number P14058.
The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, The William Rockhill Nelson Collection, 2nd ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1941), 15.
Ross E. Taggart, ed., Handbook of the Collections in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 4th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1959), 44.
Cornelius Vermeule, “Greek and Roman Portraits in American Collections Open to the Public: A Survey of Important Monumental Likenesses in Marble and Bronze Which Have Not Been Published Extensively,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 108, 2 (1964): 105.
Klaus Parlasca, Mumienporträts und verwandte Denkmäler (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag GMBH, 1966), 126, no. 4, 130, plate 31.1.
William Peck, Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt, exh. cat. (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1967), 17, no. 11.
Klaus Parlasca, Repertorio d’arte dell’Egitto greco-romano, ser. B, vol. 1 (Rome: "L'Erma" di Bretschneider, 1969), 87, no. 225, plate 56, 1.
David Lowell Thompson, “The Classes and Hands of Painted Funerary Portraits from Antinoopolis” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1972), 58-63, no. 3, 66, 70-72, plate 5.
Ross E. Taggart and George L. McKenna, eds., Handbook of the Collections in The William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, vol. 1, Art of the Occident, 5th ed. (Kansas City, MO: William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, 1973), 54.
Roger Ward and Patricia J. Fidler, eds., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1993), 105.
Euphrosyne Doxiadis, The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 217, no. 30.
Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 10, fig. 21.
Lauren Martin, “A Study of the painted funerary portraits from Roman Antinoopolis” (PhD diss., Oxford, [2011?]), no. 45.
Tashia Dare, "Coptic Textiles," in Danielle Skjelver, et al, History of Applied Science & Technology, The Digital Press @ UND. https://press.rebus.community/historyoftech/ (accessed December 20, 2021).