Hermione Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The subject of the Amarna Princess was mentioned
> very briefly in a previous post ...

The opinion of several Egyptologists in the EEF Discussion Group cited quite a number of artistic problems with the "Bolton Princess."

See the image discussion at EEF. You can also read the archives at the EEF website as to the textual discussion in the April 2006.zip at Archives.

Here are my comments from the EEF discussion on the subject, back in April 2006:

---

Several factors played into the decision it was a forgery:

a) Suspicious artefacts coming from the same source which claimed a long term possession of the "Bolton princess". In the March 26, 2003 Times article, it was these other artefacts which led to suspicions about the Bolton Princess. The Times said:

"Scotland Yard's Arts and Antiques squad began an investigation two weeks ago when the British Museum reported the arrival of a suspicious Syrian relief. Curators who had been asked to inspect the relief for a private client observed that it had come from a similar source to the Amarna Princess. Police seized the relief and two other objects in London and
impounded the Princess.

They also raided a house in Bromley Cross, Bolton, where they arrested a 46-year-old man on suspicion of forgery. Acting Chief Inspector Martin Freschini told The Times that the Bolton house resembled a workshop. 'There were items of marble and ancillary equipment for making statues and the like,' he said. 'We seized a number of items and a quantity of cash.'"

Source: Times Online

b) One reason the "Bolton Princess" had been considered genuine was because of the claims of the owners of the long-term and provenanced pedigree of the statue. That "pedigree" has now been found questionable, if not completely false.

According to the Times article, the claim was that in 1892 the great-grandfather had bought it at the auction of the property of the Earl of Egremont in 1892. A copy of the Silverton Park auction catalogue of the 1892 Egremont sale obtained by Times contained very few details of any matching statues. The catalogue contained three lots that could have been the Amarna Princess. The sale included a draped figure of a female, five marble statuettes and eight Egyptian figures. None mentions that the statue had no head or arms.

This catalogue evidence seems to have been convincing enough for Bolton Council, which obtained a grant of £360,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund as well as £75,000 from the National Art Collections Fund and £2,500 from the Friends of Bolton Museum and Art Gallery.

Angela Thomas, curator of the Bolton Museum, posted some of the factors which led the Museum officials to trust the provenance; a discussion of these factors can be found here and here.

The actual arraignment of these men who operated the Bolton "workshop," aged 83 and 46, will not be held until some time in May (2006), and at that time it will likely be shown by the Courts what evidence they have to their charges against them.

The main test that seems to have failed was one of logic, IMO. Simply because the Earl of Egremont in 1892 did sell some Egyptian statuary which could have been the source of the Amarna Princess was the event which made both Museum and artefact experts tend to think the statue was genuine.

Rather, what occurred was a jump to conclusions, for since the 1892 Egyptian pieces were not well-described, the forgers were able to pass of their piece as one of the actual auctioned 1892 items. They also appealed to the sense of local pride to the Bolton Council, by claiming they were making the offer to them alone at a "discount price" (eventually £440,000 UKP) since they "wanted to keep it in the Bolton area."

I don't see the "Bolton Princess" situation as a failure of expertise or scientific testing, but probably a matter of 'wishing it was true' seemed to make it so. A good provenance is one of the bases for any art expert to ascertain an item is genuine, and until the discovery of the workshop, there was no reason to question it.

---

Discussing the actual proportions of the statue (in line with the image discussion, above), I wrote:

---

To me, there is a more disturbing effect about the Bolton princess when compared to the Louvre example you give and to Louvre E25409, which is the closest example to which the "Bolton Princess" compares, according to Bolton curator Angela Thomas, in discussing similar Amarna statuary. This is the short-waistedness of the subject, which doesn't correspond with an almost iconic "long-waistedness" of Amarna figures, be they the royal children, Nefertiti, Tiye at Amarna, or even Akhenaten himself.

I've posted an image of the Bolton princess' features in this regard against its closest related Amarna statue, Louvre E25409 at Photo 2.

But I also suggest looking at other examples, such as UC004 at the Petrie Museum, also included in the above URL, as well as the Amarna dyad statue Ms. Pearman indicated (Louvre E 15593), or other Amarna statues such as Cairo JE 43580, or Berlin 21263 [[b]Photo 3[/b] on the above EEFBBS page].

In all cases the waists on these subjects are far "longer" and lower slung than on the 'Bolton Princess.'

---

You can read even more interesting analyses of the statue in the EEF Archives, as noted above.

HTH.

Katherine Griffis-Greenberg

Doctoral Candidate
Oriental Institute
Doctoral Programme in Oriental Studies [Egyptology]
Oxford University
Oxford, United Kingdom