An Egyptian Polychrome Wood Canopic Chest, Ptolemaic Period, 305-30 B.C.

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July 5, 12:24 PM GMT

Estimate

5,000 - 8,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

Property from the Collection of Axel Vervoordt

An Egyptian Polychrome Wood Canopic Chest

Ptolemaic Period, 305-30 B.C.

in the form of a shrine with tapering walls and cavetto cornice, the front painted with the bolted double doors of the shrine, two winged scarabs above, the sides each painted with the mummified deceased lying on a bier, flanked on one side by mourning Isis and Nephthys, and on the other by a mourning goddess and woman, three friezes of linked djed-pillars and girdles of Isis above, the back decorated with a deity (Osiris?) with body in the form of a djed-pillar and wearing an atef-crown, flanked by addorsed deity-headed uraei, and surmounted by a winged deity, the missing lid probably once surmounted by Sokar in the form of a mummified falcon.

Height 39.5 cm.

Sotheby’s, London, May 31st, 1990, no. 211, illus.
Sotheby’s, London, December 10th-11th, 1992, no. 137, illus.
Private collection, New Jersey
Sotheby's, New York, June 4th, 2014, no. 58, illus.
acquired by the present owner in 2016

Cf. S. D’Auria, P. Lacovara, and C.H. Roehrig, Mummies & Magic, The Funerary Arts of Ancient Egypt, Boston, 1988, no. 143, and Brooklyn Museum, acc. no. 37.1390E (R.A. Fazzini, "Arts of Asia", 26,6, 1996, fig. 59), and J.H. Taylor and N.C. Strudwick, Mummies, Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, Treasures from the British Museum, Santa Ana, California, 2005, pp. 82-83.