 Hi everyone and welcome to Barn's Takeout. I'm Karl Walsh, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Research, Education and Interpretation here at the Barns. And today I wanted to talk about a large stone Egyptian relief that is in Room 16 as part of the East Wall Ensemble and it's this very large relief which is just down in this corner here, so really nice and close to the floor, which might mean that it's kind of a bit hard to look at sometimes. And I wanted to talk about this relief today because it raises a really important issue for museum collections which is identifying and discussing modern productions of ancient works. And part of my role at the Barns is to determine if there are any modern productions of Egyptian art in amongst the objects in the museum. And this relief is one of the objects that is suspect at the moment. So before we get into talking about this in a little bit more detail, I want you to have a good look at this relief. And if you're having trouble seeing it, I also highly recommend that you go to the Barns website and go to our collection search and have a look for this relief. It's a relief of a woman. It should be quite easy to find in the catalogue and you can do a nice deep zoom look at this image if you can't see it too well. So have a close look at this and think and consider, do you think this is ancient or modern and why? And then we'll come back to that later on in the talk. So I use the term modern productions intentionally here because it can mean a couple of different things. It can refer to casts of ancient works. It can refer to copies that were made by modern artists and it can refer to forgeries, which can be either modifications of an ancient object or completely new productions that are kind of modeled and based after ancient works but are intentionally designed to kind of pass off as ancient works. And these distinctions are really important because the first two casts and copies, they're usually not trying to attempt to pass as an ancient work. They are usually made for legitimate reasons, such as further study and to help improve the range of objects and display at a museum collection or a private collection. And they're used for things like for the tourist trade and as things to sell as just replicas and copies. So they're never intended to deceive anyone. Forgeries, on the other hand, are intentionally made to be deceptive. They are intended to look like ancient works and they are tended to be sold on the art market for very high prices. And so the intention there is really important. They're not ever intended to be things that are used for quite a study or to be recognized as modern productions. So all of these types of modern productions were made at the time that Barnes was acquiring these Egyptian objects for the collection in the early 1920s and in the 1930s. And the Parisian art scene that he was buying a lot of these objects from was really full of forgeries of varying different qualities that were being made both in Egypt and in Europe. So both Egypt and Europe are the kind of centers of forgery production at this time. So some of these forgeries every May are so convincing that they fooled a lot of Egyptologists at the time who would acquire them and they would be displayed in museum collections. And so it's still something that even today that a lot of museums are kind of dealing with is trying to figure out what is real or what is not. And then what do you do with them when you identify them? Which is something that varies a lot from museum to museum. So taking that on board, we're having a look at this relief and thinking, you know, is this modern or is it ancient? And if it is modern, what kind of production is it? So looking closely at this relief, you can see that we have the image of this sitting woman who's wearing this slightly transparent linen dress. She's got this kind of jeweled flower collar around her neck. She's got a little kind of headdress or headband, which has them like a flower, a lotus flower on top of her head. And she's holding a little bunch of lotus flowers in one hand. And in the other hand, she's holding something that looks kind of like a flower bulb, but which might actually be a mandrake fruit. And I'll come back to that a little bit later. And then at the top of the relief, you can see we have this kind of broken section. And there's part of an inscription in hieroglyphs. And we have a cartouche, which is this round, sorry, oval, coiled rope motif that surrounds always a royal name. And inside that, we have the name of Taharca, who is a Nubian king, dating to about the 7th century BC, who ruled a Nubian kingdom called Napata, which included Egypt at this time. So this king is someone that we know and who we have a particular date range for. So looking again closely at this relief, there's already a couple of things that are kind of off with it, which have kind of raised my suspicion about it, and which don't really conform to standard traditions and canon of Egyptian art. And the first thing I would want to kind of zoom in on is the feet. So if you look at the feet here, you can see that there is the incorporation of a perspective that gives it a kind of sense of depth and three dimension. And you can also see that she's kind of floating in this space. She's not quite, she's not sat on a baseline. She's not sat on like a piece of furniture. She's kind of floating in space. And her feet have these kind of different baselines that go off at different angles. And both of these aspects, the incorporation of a perspective and this kind of lack of a single baseline are things that almost never appear in Egyptian art. So they're very, very unusual. And they point much more towards a classical or modern style and traditions in terms of how perspective is used. In Egyptian art, we would usually find feet firmly planted on a single baseline, and they would be in profile and side by side with just a little bit of overlap to give an idea of depth and that they're kind of separate from each other. And we wouldn't have this kind of very kind of perspective orientated look at the feet. So this is immediately kind of very off. You'll also notice that there is a kind of a little bit of a strange proportions to her body too. She's got this very bulbous lower body, which is not very in keeping with Egyptian depictions of women. Often they have a much more kind of triangular, broken body proportion. And so this is kind of a little bit unusual. And then her face is also interesting. She has this very kind of naturalistic looking representation, which is again, not really what we see in Egyptian art. It's a little bit more stylized. And there are little things that are kind of missing here. She doesn't have a stylized kind of coal line around her eye. And her eyebrow is kind of just much more like contoured rather than actually stylized, which is in Egyptian art usually you have like a little bar that kind of represents the eyebrow. And we don't have that here. So that's also unusual. And again, just the proportions of her face are very, very naturalistic looking. And they don't quite fit. They point much more towards kind of classical modern styles and cannons than Egyptian art. So a little bit strange too. Another clear thing is that her hair is blue, which we never find in Egyptian art, except sometimes in depictions of goddesses who were believed to have hair made out of lapis lazuli. So but this is a depiction of an elite woman. So this isn't what you would find normally either. So already like some basic things that point here that this is probably a modern, not an ancient production. Also looking just in general at the subject of the relief. So we have this sitting kind of reclining woman who's decked out at her finest attire. And this is something that is usually found in things like banquet scenes from tomb paintings and relief belonging to members of the elite and members of the court that date to the New Kingdom period. So roughly between the dates from 1550 to about 1250 BC. So these scenes are usually depicting women enjoying a banquet. They're drinking, they're smelling flowers. They're sometimes holding and giving mandrake fruit to each other, which are kind of smelt. And we think that kind of mandrake fruit was viewed as a possible sexual symbol. And it may have been seen to be an aphrodisiac. So the appearance of this kind of fruit is very specific to certain types of scenes, such as this banquet scene. So what I think here is that this is probably a representation of a mandrake fruit that she's holding on her other hand. And this kind of ties it very specifically with these types of scenes that come from the New Kingdom period and are tied with these depictions of banquets. And at the time of the early kind of 1920s, 1930s, there were a number of museums that had very prominent displays of these types of scenes. And the one that I would point everyone to is the Tomb of Nebhamoon, which is in the British Museum in London. And there are some wonderful banquet scenes that were on display at the times that this relief might have been made. What's also kind of problematic is that this kind of image of a woman kind of seems to come from the New Kingdom period. But the cartouche that we were looking at earlier, that dates to kind of the 7th century BC to the Nubian King Teharka is really at odds with this image. So the reliefs that we get from this period, from the Napatin period in the 7th century, these are usually much more kind of flat and rigid. They combine aspects of Nubian art with very archaic Egyptian art forms. So they're much more kind of, they're much kind of more rigid, and not as kind of relaxed as what we see here. And so there's a little bit of an odd here in terms of the subject, the style and the royal name that we have. They come from different periods, and this indicates that this isn't a cast or a copy of an ancient work, that this is instead something that is completely new. And so instead, this has probably been modeled after at least two different ancient pieces. A banquet scene that dates to the New Kingdom, and a later Napatin object or relief that has the cartouche of this king, Teharka. So this makes this a forgery, which is a completely new piece that's intended to look ancient and be sold on the art market for a higher price. And the incorporation of a royal name here is probably also been included to jack up the price a little bit higher. So it's definitely something that's kind of a bit suspect. And the forger probably included this to try to make a more of a profit off of it. But I'd just like to point out that just because something is a modern production doesn't make it worthless, or something to hide, or take off display, because these pieces are still works of art that can be appreciated. It's still a really nice relief. I still enjoy looking at it. And it can be also used to educate about forgery production and at the time of the early 1920s and the 30s. And it can also be used to look at different types of and styles of Egyptian and Nubian art, which is really beneficial. And there's a lot of kind of fascinating stories that are attached to these objects too. And these are things that I'll be looking at more in my work at the Barnes too. So next time you have a look in the gallery, and you go to room 16, have a look at this relief and see if you can spot any other features that would point to it being a modern production because there are some others too, which I just don't have time to go through. So that's it for today's Barnes Takeout. If you haven't already, please subscribe to our channel to get more servings of art and leave a comment. I'd personally be very interested to see and hear your thoughts on the subject of forgeries and if you were able to guess or identify if this was a forgery at the start. So please take care and stay safe. I'm Tom Collins, Nubauer family executive director of the Barnes Foundation. I hope you enjoyed Barnes Takeout. Subscribe and make sure your post notifications are on to get daily servings of art. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.