Woman Smelling a Lotus Flower
Unknown · Reign of Thutmose IV, c. 1398-1388 BC
A woman in profile lifts a blue lotus to her nose and breathes in its scent. She wears a heavy enveloping wig and a broad usekh collar of coloured beads across her chest, painted on a piece of mud plaster no larger than a sheet of paper. Look at the line: the painter drew the eye, the nose and the lips with a single confident brush, and the flower is held delicately between finger and thumb. Beneath the colours you can make out the squared grid ruled on the wet plaster before painting, the guide that fixed the proportions of the figure.
The fragment comes from the wall of a private tomb chapel at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, on the west bank of Thebes, and dates to the reign of Thutmose the Fourth around thirteen ninety BC. In such chapels the tomb owner and his family were shown at a banquet, the women holding lotus flowers whose perfume was thought to bring rebirth. The plaster, a mix of Nile mud and straw, was cut from the wall long ago; the piece was given to the Louvre in nineteen ninety eight and now joins other fragments from Theban tombs in this room.
Did You Know? The faint grid squares under the paint are the same guidelines an Egyptian painter used to keep every figure in the correct proportion.
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