THE BEAUTY WITHIN: The Chenel Collection

An Egyptian Polychrome and Gilt Cartonnage Mummy Mask, late Ptolemaic Period, circa 100-30 B.C.

UK: Greenford Park Warehouse

Lot Closed

December 17, 03:35 PM GMT

Estimate

8,000 - 12,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

An Egyptian Polychrome and Gilt Cartonnage Mummy Mask

late Ptolemaic Period, circa 100-30 B.C.

wearing a broad collar and wig with headband knotted in back and Eye of Horus in relief in front, the stylized hair falling in linked spirals over the forehead, the gilt face with eyes and eyebrows painted black and white, the lappets decorated on the left with a seated figure of Nephthys and on the right with a seated figure of Isis, a diminutive figure of a woman wearing a diademed tripartite wig on the back; traces of bitumen.

Height 46 cm.

Galerie des Saints-Pères, 11 rue des Saints-Pères, Paris
Belgian private collection, aquired from the above on April 26th, 1980

Sotheby's, New York, December 12th, 2013, no. 18, illus.
Sotheby's, New York, December 8th, 2015, no. 31, illus.
Sotheby's, Hong-Kong, Curiosity IV, April 2nd, 2018, no. 3047, illus.

For related examples see G. Grimm, Die Römischen Mummienmasken aus Ägypten, Wiesbaden, 1974, color pl. A, and pl. 4, 4.

A 1980 photograph from Galerie des Saints-Pères shows streaks of bitumen over the broad collar and wig lappets (still extant in 2013).