Introduction

Ancient Egyptian Painting
We must distinguish two Egyptian methods of showing forms in non-raised two-dimensional representations. One has only coloured areas, which are not enclosed within lines, while the other delineates the figures without filling them in with colours. The lines can be on the surface (painted) or incised.
The purpose of the paintings on the Tomb walls
Egyptian tombs were regarded as the homes of the dead in which the deceased owner still hoped to enjoy the delights of his earthy life. Hence his occupations, agriculture, fishing, official duties for the king, as well as his pastimes of sport, music, dancing, and feasting were painted or sculptured on the walls. His spirit-soul could enter, by the aid of magic formulae, into the life of the after-world conceived in terms familiar to him when he was alive.
Tomb decorations also include scenes of the funerary rites of the deceased and his journey from this world to the next.
In addition to the tomb walls, the ancient Egyptian painter painted on the papyrus, such as the papyri of the Book of the Dead, on the ostraca, potsherds or flakes of limestone which have been found in great numbers in the Theban necropolis, on the coffins and on the mummy portraits which made at a very late period.
The purpose of the paintings on some papyrus and the ostraca was just for the art, but its purpose on other papyrus, the coffins and the mummy portraits was religious.

Conventions followed by the Ancient Egyptian Artists
Those unfamiliar with Egyptian art may find it difficult to appreciate its conscious conventions. Perspective is ignored except in a few rare instances. When a full face is drawn the eyes are correctly shown, but the same position is assigned to them in the far more general view of the side face; shoulders have a frontal aspect while the rest of the body is drawn sideways.
Strict rules handed down from earliest times governed the representation of the human form, and these especially apply to deities, kings, and owners of tombs. Principal figures are drawn larger than the rest to show their greater importance in the scenes.
More freedom was allowed when peasants or humble persons were concerned, and particularly in the depiction of animal and bird life.
The Egyptian artist portrayed his subject on a single flat plane without use of light and shade, or other visual subtelties that concerned artists of later times. Each object is shown in its most characteristic or easily perceived form and from the most telling view, and these are assembled in a delightful yet orderly way to convey as much information as possible in the given space. Take, for example, food for the deceased. This was a subject of prime importance, and scenes of such offerings appear in almost every tomb in the necropolis. The table for the provisions is invariably shown in profile, but the items are arranged in vertical tiers above, with every item depicted in the way it is most easily recognized. By this convention the food could be shown clearly, and far more could be displayed than the table itself could bear. To make certain there was enough, the artist usually painted hieroglyphic signs representing "thousands" beneath the table.
The wall-painting were enclosed by a decorative frieze along the top; a dado of broad bands of colour at the bottom; and a narrow border up the sides. The scenes were divided by horizontal black lines.
Perhaps there were certain standards from which the artist could only break away at times, and, while acknowledging the definite limitations of his art as it appears to our generation, yet remember that many of our modern artists have gone much further than the Egyptians in distorting the human form.

Preparation of the surfaces of the tomb walls for decoration
Preparation of the surfaces of the tomb walls were of three kinds, which we describe hereunder: smoothed limestone, a coat of stucco, or a loam-and-straw foundation.
when the rock in which the tomb was hewn, was of good quality, the walls were carefully smoothed down, all holes and cracks being filled with plaster, and the artist painted directly on the surface of the rock-cut wall.
Most of the paintings at Thebes, anyhow those of the XVIIIth Dynasty, were done on stucco, not on the bare rock. It is obvious that a thick coat of mud plaster was applied to the uneven rock-face, layer by layer, the wet loam being mixed with straw to reinforce it. Next, this foundation, rather like adobe, was overlaid with a film some two millimeters thick of a compound of plaster and powdered stone, constituting a smooth, fine-grained mortar enabling the utmost delicacy of line. According to the materials with which it is made, the stucco is in various shades of rather dingy grey, beige or brown; in any case it does not act as a ground to the pictures but it is always given a coat of paint.
In the scenes which were done on a loam-and-straw foundation (the third method), we can detect tiny shreds of the straw reinforcing the mud plaster in several places. If it seems strange that so precarious a foundation was used for pictures of such high excellence, it is still more wonderful that they should have survived so well. For on close inspection we realize that a mere breath of air would be enough to dislodge there gossamer films of pigment, frail as a butterfly's wing, from the wall of dried mud. It is regrettable that, from the XIXth dynasty on, this technique became general. The artist contented himself with covering the loam-and-straw foundation with a thin white or yellow undercoat and painted on this ground. Since he could no longer resort to the old method of squaring off the picture surface and making corrections which were subsequently masked by successive layers of pigment, much virtuosity was called for. Inevitably works of the Ramesside period show traces of this over-hasty execution.

Method of Decorating the Tombs
Once the wall surface was made ready, the artist began by drawing horizontal lines making off the "registers" or tiers, next, for the scenes which called for elaborate treatment, whether because of their dimensions or their subject-matter, he subdivided the register into squares following an established canon and enabling him to locate each detail in its proper place. These guide-lines were made with cords soaked in red paint, splashes of which are sometimes visible along the lines. Once he had thus marked out his "canvas", the artist outlined his figures, and, laying in the background, caused them to stand out.
This background was usually grey-blue during the early and middle periods of the XVIIIth Dynasty. At the end of the XVIIIth and in the XIXth Dynasty it became white. Yellow grounds were favored during the period of the Ramses. When the artist started painting the figure he began, it seems, with the flesh-tints, using more or less vivid red ochre for the men and yellow, pink or pale suntan brown for women. For clothing, one or more coats of white were used, according to the degree of transparency or opaqueness called for multicolored jewels were depicted en masse before being given detailed treatment. The coiffures usually were done last. Meanwhile, in the course of these operations, the original sketch had gradually lost its sharpness of definition; the painter remedied this by drawing with his brush a new outline in red (except at Deir El-Medina where it is black).

The colours of scenes
The Egyptian artists strive to give each object its own colour, in which process the Egyptian eye often perceived and evaluated differently from our own. As is well known, the skin colour of men is mostly a reddish brown, and of women a yellow, both of which appear in many gradations of tone. In the New Kingdom for example, the yellow colour of the women approaches a light tone of the male colour by way of a pale red. Egyptian hair is black and naturally long. When gods', kings', and dead people's hair is depicted as blue in paintings one wonders whether this may have a symbolic basis.
In groups where the individual elements that are in fact the same colour obscure one another so that the eye could easily confuse them, as with wrestlers, teams of horses, and especially rows of people, artists do not scruple to paint the figures alternately light and dark.
Of course, the colours of pictures are always meant to represent the colours of the objects as seen from close to, and not as they appear modified by aerial perspective, or by the reflection of nearby colours and other such phenomena. We correct factors of this type so automatically and unconsciously that there are still people who are unwilling or even refuse to admit of their existence. They may agree, as they have seen pictures from childhood on that show it, that distant hills appear blue, but scarcely that only a few metres of air have a similar effect. Egyptians worked almost solely with even areas of unbroken colour, though they knew how to modulate gradually from one to another in places where the colours do not separate sharply from each other, as with spots on animals' skins. In such cases the transition is sometimes effected by means of hatching or stippling. Between the upper edge of a picture or the sky and the lower edge or the ground the figures are mostly set against a white background. White is the colour against which forms are most clearly distinguished. When other colours are used in its place it must be assumed this is for reason of taste, not because of differing models in nature. This applies especially to a very attractive blue-grey that was popular at some periods, and is excellently suited to act as a mediator for vivid colours without associating them one with another.
We must mention here that towards the middle of the XVIIIth Dynasty some painters tried to protect certain details by covering them with a thin coat of varnish. Unfortunately, this has become so brown or yellow with the years as to disfigure the picture. Flesh-tints in particular have suffered, and the drawings, too, has lost its sharpness under a film of opaque and brittle glaze. In fact these "protected" works exposed to greater risks than the others, since the varnish tends to flake away, dragging off the pigment with it. These painters would have done better to trust to the Egyptian climate which, thanks to its extreme dryness, is the ideal preservation.
At the end of this point, we must mention that specified colours were employing for sacred beings, idealisted and traditional colours for human beings, artificial colours for imitating stone and wood, realistic and mouth-watering colours for offerings and speckled colours for animal fur.

The Equipment of the Egyptian Artists for painting
Reeds with chewed tips, little brushes made of palm-fibre, pots of water and palettes made of shells or broken sherds, were the simple equipment of the Egyptian artists for painting in tempera.
Making the colours
The colour schemes of the pharaonic painters were always very simple and they used the tempera process exclusively. The pigments consisted of natural substances ground to powder; the artist mixed them with water, adding a little gum so as to make them adhere to the surface, rock, plaster or puddled earth, on which he was to paint. Red, yellow and brown ochres predominate, their intensity diminishing the more they are diluted. These are mostly used for flesh-tints. Whitewash was used for garments and at the close of the XVIIIth Dynasty for backgrounds too. By applying a single coat or several, the artist could get effects of transparency or opacity, as desired. When mixed with or superimposed on red ochre, it served for the blush-pink of women's faces and certain kinds of fruit, animals or food in scenes of offerings. Blue and green are much employed; the base of both a like was copper frit and for this reason they are sometimes hard to distinguish. In the zigzags signifying water, the blue painted over the white ground acquires delicate translucencies. During the first half of the XVIIIth Dynasty all backgrounds were in blue; on limestone walls it became a little paler, tending towards azure, whereas on porous stucco it shaded off into a neutral, low-toned blue-grey. Green is reserved for leafage, thickets of papyrus, offering of vegetables or flowers; also for certain elements in necklets, bracelets and girdles, where it is used to represent enameled beads. On these the colour is often applied so thickly that it stands out in relief. It is difficult to say whether this was intentional, or a consequence of humidity. In any cases, green is the colour that has suffered most from exposure to the air; in many places it has developed a rusty hue which the original painter certainly did not desire. Sometimes, too, it has had an injurious effect on the plaster.
Black is still more impermanent, made of soot, it held badly on the wall, which is why in some cases the huge wigs worn by the women have disappeared, leaving the yellowish limestone or stucco bare - with the startling result that at first sight we might imagine that the Egyptian lady at the New Kingdom was usually a blonde! when mixed with other pigments black held better. Mixed with white, it was used for the grey of birds' wings or pleated dresses; with ochre, for producing a deep, rich red.

The shadow in the Ancient Egyptian Scenes
It has frequently been remarked the Egyptian art does not of course pay any attention to cast shadows, but nor does it to the shadows within a body. This is true for the most part. But in the XIXth Dynasty one side of the nose is sometimes given deeper skin tone than the rest. These variations in tone, which are not distributed as if they were the result of a single light source, are not intended to indicate rounding of the features or the actual shadow, but rather the warmer tone that colours have in the shade.
The only places where shadows are to be found in Egyptian painting are the natural folds of clothing in New Kingdom pictures. At first their colour is a fine grey, while later yellowy-green appears. Earlier art does not show such folds either in painting or in relief, only the artificial close pleats used decoratively in many garments. In the Middle Kingdom it was fashionable to render the sharp-edged creases, which are produced by clothes lying in a large pile, as lines, as if to show that the owner could always dip into a full chest of garments. When pleated clothes fall close to the red-brown body the surface is coloured a soft pale red by spreading white thinly over it; it is left thus for the recesses in the pleats, which lie against the skin, while their peaks have additional layers of white. So light and shade are not represent here, only degrees of translucency.
As is well known the Egyptians are not alone in their reluctance to paint shadows. Medieval and, still more, far Eastern painting avoids them entirely, or softens them as much as possible. As they are changing all the time shadows are felt to be accidental and off-putting; and heavy ones would deface an otherwise harmonious picture.
The black hatchings on certain parts of the bodies of comically represented peasants in New Kingdom paintings do not indicate shadows but hair, however anatomically unsound their distribution may be. It must remain doubtful whether in painting of the same period, a black line in the cleft of the mouth and in the nostril is meant to indicate the deep shadow or just the cavity.

The Ceilings Decoration
The ceilings were painted as well as the walls. In the XIXth Dynasty stiff geometrical patterns were divided by yellow bands bearing the name and titles of the deceased in blue. These divided the patterns into a series of panels. Later freer designs of birds, butterflies, flowers, stars and other motifs were common.
The painting in the old kingdom
The Old Kingdom is much more scantily represented in the field of painting propre. True, during the period from the IVth to the VIth Dynasty, both in the Memphite necropolis at (Giza, Saqqara, Dahshur and Meidum) and in the provincial cemeteries (Deir El-Bersha, Meir, Deir El-Gabrawi, Aswan), some of the tombs of persons of high standing were adorned with mural paintings, but these are usually in a bad state of preservation, Any attempt to base on the surviving specimens an historical survey of pharaonic painting from the reign of King Sneferu to that of Pepi II would tend to present the facts in a false light.
The painted scenes in the Old Kingdom were painted on a coat of stucco covering the walls of unbaked bricks or stone in the mastabas.
We should be doing less than justice to the art of the Old Kingdom - which the Egyptians themselves came, in later times, to regard as their Golden Age - were we to draw any positive conclusions from the few works of pictorial art that have survived. A truer idea of it is given by the bas-reliefs, in which the wall carvings are supplemented by paintings, in the mastabas. The scenes, which were made by this method, illustrate the closeness of the link between sculpture and painting, as the Egyptians conceived them.

The painting in the Middle Kingdom
In the Middle Kingdom, there has been more difficulty in providing a selection of representative paintings. The chief site where wall paintings of the XIth and XIIth Dynasties have been discovered is Beni Hassan in Middle Egypt. Here several nomarchs excavated enormous burial chambers in the cliffs and decked the walls with paintings. Unfortunately most of these are now in such a condition that it would be wasted labor trying to photograph them; the best passages are hidden by an opaque film of dirt that has accumulated in the course of forty centuries.
The painters of the Middle Kingdom almost followed, the methods, which were used by the painters of the Old Kingdom.

The Painting in the New Kingdom
As compared with earlier periods, the New Kingdom impresses us as being the great epoch of Egyptian painting, so many and so varied are the works belonging to it that have survived. From the reigns of Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis III up to the end of the XXth Dynasty, Theban artists continuously produced works of a high order better than in any other period. These New Kingdom painters tried their hand at all the genres practiced by their predecessors; moreover, these paintings have the advantage of being grouped together in a single locality, the necropolis of ancient Thebes.
Since almost all the tombs at Thebes were hollowed out in the cliffs, the decorations were frequently made on a limestone ground. Unfortunately, the rock-face in these parts is highly friable. Where there happened to be patch of good stone, the sculptor was usually called in first, and the painter's task was merely to colour the relief. Sculpture and painting went hand in hand, and it is no easy matter drawing the line between them. Should we regard a coloured relief as being intrinsically sculpture painted over, or as a painting on a surface chiseled and modeled to give it fuller tactile values.
The Theban temples at Karnak, Luxor, the Ramesseum and Medinet-Habu were built in Nubian sandstone, a rough, coarse-grained stone. The walls were covered with a coat of smallest details, in vivid colours. The effect must have been by modern standards unbearably garish, as garish as the original colour of the Parthenon, unless of course the blurring effect of the eastern sunlight allayed their virulence. Except in a very few places the plaster has gone and with it the colours, leaving the wall bare. And now that the lack of vigor of the bas-reliefs and sunk reliefs per se not to mention the corrections made by the sculptors responsible for them, can be plainly seen, it is obvious that the painter had the last word in these creations.
A similar, if less satisfactory, procedure was followed in several royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens, where the passages and tomb-chambers are situated in the depths of a calcareous mountain; here the walls were dressed with a more or less thick coat of gypsum which was lightly carved, then painted. Now that this coat has crumbled away, we might well suppose these tombs were left undecorated, were it not that here and there the sculptor's chisel struck through into the limestone. Thus dozens of square yards of inscriptions and depictions of scenes of the after-life which might have thrown much light on the Egyptian religion are irrevocably lost.
Most tragic of all is the predicament of the tomb of Queen Nefertari. Here the superb paintings on modeled stucco are delighted the eyes of archaeologists, art historian and tourists alike.
We find the same technique employed in private tombs of the Ramesside period.

Language: Aspects of writing | Linguistic Features | Hieroglyphs etc.Gods

Paint: Introduction | Subjects of paint scenes

Sculpture: Introduction | Old kingdom statues | Middle kingdom statues | New kingdom statues

Mummification

Geography

About us

Guest book