Portrait of a Woman from Thebes

The artwork

This portrait has been in the Louvre since 1826, when France bought Henry Salt's collection of Egyptian antiquities on the advice of Champollion, the man who a few years earlier had deciphered hieroglyphs. You receive it printed on handmade Amalfi paper, in a handmade frame.

• The large eyes under thick eyebrows, the black hair, the pearl earrings.
• An intense portrait, lovely in a living room or a study.
• A gift for anyone who loves Egypt and the history of discoveries.

The woman lived in Egypt between AD 150 and 200, when the country was a province of Rome. Her face was painted with colours mixed into wax on a limewood panel two millimetres thick, which was placed over the mummy's face among the bandages when she died. It is one of the portraits we call Fayum portraits, after the region of Egypt where many were found, but this one comes from much further south: from Thebes, today's Luxor, on the west bank of the Nile where the tombs lay.

Henry Salt was the British consul in Egypt, and alongside his diplomatic duties he gathered thousands of antiquities. Jean-François Champollion, the French scholar who in 1822 had worked out how to read hieroglyphs, persuaded the King of France to buy the collection for the Louvre, and so this woman came to Paris. The museum's inventory records her in 1826. The painter dressed her in the Roman way, with tunic and mantle and the coloured stripe of the clavus on her shoulder, and gave her a gold necklace and pearls at her ears.

In a living room or a study it brings home a face that has crossed Egypt, the sea and two thousand years. It is a gift for anyone who loves archaeology and its great stories.

Unique quality material

Print on handmade Amalfi paper
Sheet size: 29 x 42 cm (11.4 x 16.5 in)
With frame: 31 x 44 cm (12.2 x 17.3 in)
Material: artwork printed on very fine handmade Amalfi paper with deckled edges
Frame: dark brown with gold fillet, handmade, with glass