More re Nebamun

The Eloquent Peasant (Margaret Maitland)

I love Margaret's blog, and am glad that she has found the time to update it with a great account of the Nebamun painting restoration and the new gallery. Here's a short extract:

Over the past few years, I myself was very lucky to have the amazing opportunity to work the paintings over the summer months that I spent as a curatorial intern at the British Museum. When I was a teenager, I actually had a poster of the painting of Nebamun fowling in the marshes in my room, so needless to say it was an extraordinary experience. One of the things I was able to do was contributing to the descriptions of the paintings in Chapter Three of the book ‘The Painted Tomb-Chapel of Nebamun: Masterpieces of ancient Egyptian art in the British Museum‘.

For this task, my fellow intern Ally and I sat in front of them for hours, examining them in minute detail and considering the individual brushstrokes. Every time I looked at them, a new detail would catch my eye. The paintings are incredibly skillfully produced, exhibiting numerous delicate techniques used to produce various textures and effects. But at the same time, they are no means perfect, the erosion of the paint revealing original sketch lines, corrections, and gridlines. There is a liveliness to the innovative composition, tightly interweaving figures to produce both movement and a wonderful sense of harmony. While many of the images are standard scenes that had been appearing in tombs for hundreds of years, the artists managed to breathe fresh life into them, in ways never seen before in Egyptian art.

In the course of their conservation and examination, wonderful details were newly noted that had somehow never been observed before since the paintings arrived at the British Museum 190 years ago, such as the real gold used on the cat’s eye and the green paint on the left-hand side of the garden scene that can be reconstructed as a large sycomore fig tree.

See the above for her full post, and check out the links that she provides to other articles and features.


All About Egypt (Ben Morales-Correa)

Ben has written an excellent summary of the artwork, from his perspective as an artist himself. Here's an extract:

What is truly remarkable about this masterpiece of the Egyptian style is the design, the proper arrangement of the elements in harmonious proportion where the interaction of positive and negative space reinterprets the arcane rules of hieratic representation and converts it into a living expression of shape, color, drawing and texture. Every element of the composition plays within the setting as a "perfect picture moment". We can tell we are close to the end of the breeding season. A few birds are still sitting on the nests they have built on the papyrus reeds swayed by the winds, while others are flying about seeking food for their young. The cat is looking up to his master with a captured bird in its mouth, the large butterflies flutter wildly about the place, as the fish swim calmly unperturbed. The integration of the hieroglyphic characters with the composition is absolutely brilliant.

Ben also links to a video about the exhibit.

I was at the museum yesterday with a friend, and we loved the Nebamun room. I'll write a summary of it tomorrow, from a tourist's point of view.