The Harvard Gazette | An archaeological record that doubles as art
The Department of Anthropology at Harvard University is pleased to share a new story from The Harvard Gazette which covers artwork by artist Joseph Lindon Smith recently acquired by the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East. Peter Manuelian, Barbara Bell Professor of Egyptology and Director of the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East, shares more about this art and its background.
“When artist Joseph Lindon Smith arrived in Giza a century ago, it was on the heels of an exciting discovery: a tomb chapel for a high-ranking Egyptian official named Idu dating to 2390–2361 B.C.E.
Color photography had not yet advanced enough to be of use to archaeologists in 1925, so the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition had enlisted Smith, a former portrait artist trained in Boston, to document finds inside the Tomb of Idu. Such brightly colored renderings of archaeological sites remain valuable to scholars today.
In fact, the Harvard Museum of the Ancient Near East recently acquired “The Royal Scribe, Idu” — one of the roughly five paintings Smith made over two months at work in the tomb — now on view in a second-floor exhibition.”