Wall Painting Fragment with a Woman Smelling a Lotus Flower

Faint ruled lines run across the plaster of this fragment. They are what is left of a grid, laid out before the figure was drawn. Egyptian painters squared up the wall and set each part of the body on a fixed square, so that a figure kept the same proportions from one tomb to the next and from one hand to another. Usually the paint covered the grid completely. Here it still shows through. The fragment comes from a tomb at Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, the hillside of officials' tombs on the west bank at Thebes, painted in the reign of Thutmose IV, some 3,400 years ago. The woman wears a wig that wraps around her head and a broad usekh collar, and she breathes in the scent of a lotus, the blue water lily that opens with the morning sun and that Egyptians linked with rebirth. The fragment was given to the Louvre in 1998, and four years later it travelled in an exhibition on perfume and cosmetics in ancient Egypt, shown in Cairo, Marseille and Paris.