An Egyptian Limestone Relief of Akhet-Hotep, Superintendant of the Private Apartments of the King, Late 3rd/Early 4th Dynasty, Probably Reign of King Huni/Khufu, circa 2599-2528 B.C.

finely carved in high relief, Akhet-hotep striding to right and  holding a staff in his left hand, and wearing a round wig of striated and echeloned curls, his face with outlined lips, narrow philtrum, and large almond-shaped eye beneath a tapering eyebrow carved in relief, the three columns of inscription including his name and title.

from the mastaba of Akhet-hotep at Sakkara
Elie Borowski, Basel
Denys Sutton (1917-1991), London, acquired from the above in or prior to 1971
by descent to the present owner

Very good and as shown. The staining in the head area is darker in reality than it is in the photo. Such stains are common to other reliefs from Akhet-hotep’s mastaba, and may be the result of a ritual anointment.
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In a letter dated July 14th, 1971, Swiss Egyptologist Peter Kaplony asks Denys Sutton for a photograph of his relief “belonging to the tomb of Akhti-hetep.”

Cf. D. Arnold, K. Grzymski, and C. Ziegler,  Egyptian Art in the Age of the Pyramids, New York, 1999, p. 106, fig. 64, and R.A. Fazzini, J.F.Romano, and M. Cody, Art for Eternity, Masterworks from Ancient Egypt, Brooklyn, 1999, p.45, no. 8, reliefs of Akhet-hotep in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (58.123) and The Brooklyn Museum of Art (57.178), from Sakkara; also compare H.W. Müller, Ägyptische Kunstwerke, Kleinfunde und Glas in der Sammlung E. und M. Kofler-Truniger, Lucern, Berlin, 1964, A85, pp. 53-54.

During this period of the Old Kingdom, the age a little before or at the advent of the building of the Great Pyramid of Khufu  (Cheops) at Giza, the smooth surfaces of the figures from the mastabas such as Akhet-hotep’s  are “intentional on the part of the artist; modeling was apparently of no interest. Variations in the perfectly flat surface are rare and extremely subtle... But the thickness of the relief is rarely so spectacular in the Old Kingdom as it is here— so much so that Mariette described the decoration of Akhet-hotep’s mastaba as sculpture in the round.” (Arnold, Grzymski, and Ziegler,  op.cit. p. 107).

Denys Miller Sutton (1917-1991) assumed the role of editor of the London-based arts magazine Apollo in 1962, and retained this position for about 25 years, during which he considerably expanded the scope of the publication, addressing sensitive art preservation issues, attracting new contributors among prominent art historians and writers, writing many articles himself, and devoting several issues to the collections of museums around the world. His strong and unrelenting interest in the visual arts was a lifelong pursuit: he served as secretary of the international commission for the restitution of cultural material after World War II, worked as an art critic for Country Life and the Financial Times, authored several books on painting, including works on Watteau, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Picasso, and Whistler, and organized several exhibitions abroad such as shows on Constable and Titian in Tokyo. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (vol. 53, Oxford, 2003, p. 382) describes him as an "astute collector of art."