Egyptian sculpture

174 EGYPTIAN SCULPTURE

worn by the women are of lotuses and other Egyptian flowers, but the rendering of the forms is Greek. It is not surprising, then, to find that figures are drawn with equal facility in true profile or full-face. The convention of the front-view eye is found, but so modified in the painting by placing the iris far forward as to give almost the effect of a foreshortened eye (p. 124. fig. 8). The figure of the woman tossing her little child up to kiss it, the calf raising its head to nibble the swinging lotuses carried by the man who leads it, are naturalistic touches not found in Egyptian work. The costumes of the women are worth noting; the very slight garment of the young girl, the fuller dress of the young woman, and the robes of the matron, are difierentiated, and should be compared with the conventional dresses of Egyptian representations of a woman’s garment. The common motif of Egyptian wall-sculptures of the early periods, of hippopotami and crocodiles in a marsh with birds flying and fluttering in the reeds, is here represented in a more naturalistic manner than by the Egyptian artists; the heads of the reed-flowers are seen both in profile and from the front view. The hippopotami, however, are not drawn from life, the artist probably had never seen one, and has drawn them from description, with the result that they are merely unusually large and fat pigs. The colour of the painting is remarkable for the brilliancy and preponderance of the blues, unlike any of the coloration of earlier work. The background appears to have been a pale grey; the fleshtint for the men is the usual dark red of the Egyptian tembpaintings, but for the women it is pale pink. The animals are not painted in their natural colours, and the flowers, of which there are a great number and many varieties, are painted chiefly blue and red. The scene of the beetle between the goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt is a fine piece of