19th C. Albumen Prints of Ancient Egypt - Ramesses II, Pyramid, Nebamun (3)

Egypt, late Ottoman and British colonial period. A trio of albumen prints that charts how the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries learned to see ancient Egypt: through a painted feast, the mouth of a monument, and the bared face of a king. (1) Unknown photographer, published by Clarke & Davies, Museum Street, London (British, active ca. early 20th C.). "Banquet Scene, Tomb of Nebamun" (British Museum, EA37981), albumen print on paper, ca. 1900. Inscribed within the image at lower left, "Clarke & Davies / Museum Street," with stock number "252." The print reproduces one of the most beloved survivals of Egyptian painting, the British Museum's banquet fragment from the tomb-chapel of Nebamun, an 18th Dynasty plaster painting of ca. 1350 BCE removed from the Theban necropolis. In two registers it sets seated banquet guests, crowned with unguent cones above their pleated linen, over a row of musicians seated on the ground, two of whom turn their faces full toward the viewer in a rare departure from the strict profile of Egyptian convention, the whole crowned with vertical columns of hieroglyphs. The photograph was issued for the touring public by Clarke & Davies of Museum Street, whose Bloomsbury shop stood within sight of the museum that holds the original. (2) Gabriel Lekegian (Armenian, 1853-1920). "Entree de la Pyramide," albumen print on paper, ca. 1890. Titled, numbered, and signed in the negative along the lower margin, "Entree de la Pyramide. No. 14," and "G. Lekegian." Lekegian's Cairo studio, opposite Shepheard's Hotel, set the standard for artistic photography in Egypt. Here he frames the forced entrance on the north face of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, a single figure posted at its base to give the measure of the stone, the view catalogued in his own series as number fourteen. (3) After Emile Brugsch (German, 1842-1930). "Ramesses II," albumen print on paper, ca. 1886 to 1890s. Numbered and titled in the negative, "1183 Ramesses II." The most solemn of the three: the unwrapped head of Ramesses II, drawn from the royal cache at Deir el-Bahari in 1881 and unbandaged by Maspero in 1886, the hour that first laid bare the long aquiline profile preserved here. The image descends from Emile Brugsch, who photographed the royal dead for Maspero's "Les momies royales de Deir el-Bahari" (1889); this sheet, marked with a four-figure commercial stock number, is most likely a studio issue struck after his original. Three apertures, then, onto one long Western romance with the Nile. Item # 188251

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