Osiris and the Four Sons of Horus

Nina Macpherson Davies (1881-1965) was a British Egyptologist and artist who spent her career documenting ancient Egyptian tomb paintings, most notably in collaboration with her husband Norman de Garis Davies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian expedition. Her copies of tomb paintings from the Theban necropolis were made using careful observation and watercolor technique designed to preserve the visual information of wall paintings that were deteriorating from the moment of exposure to air. This copy of Osiris and the Four Sons of Horus reproduces funerary religious imagery from New Kingdom Egypt, transmitting iconography that would otherwise be inaccessible to most viewers.

Davies's facsimile copies use flat, precisely applied watercolor to reproduce the convention-bound idiom of ancient Egyptian painting — the hierarchical figure scale, the profile heads with frontal eyes and shoulders, the registers organizing narrative. Her skill lay in calibrating her own hand to suppress individual touch in favor of the original's systemic conventions.