A Tulunid carved wood panel, Egypt, 9th century

Ex-collection Richard Ettinghausen (1906-79), USA

The so-called ‘bevelled’ style of the carving of this panel was first located in Abbasid Iraq, at Samarra, but soon spread to Egypt (for an Abbasid example see a door panel in the Benaki Museum, Athens, inv. no.9128). The style is characterised by the distinctively slanted relief in the carving used to form repeat patterns of stylised vegetal forms. Comparable wood panels are in museum collections; see, for example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no.69.189), the National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm (acc. no.NM 0090/1935), and the Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo (inv. no.6280/2). This technique of carving continued under the Fatimids in the tenth century where further surface detail was often added to the rounded carving; see a panel sold at Christie’s, London, 7 October 2008, lot 49.