Joseph Lindon Smith (1863-1950) Relief from the Luxor Temple at Thebes, depicting Amenhotep III Presenting Offerings oil on canvas behind glass 76 x 39 1/2 in. (193.0 x 100.3 cm.) Footnotes: Provenance Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts, 1927-1993 (no. 27.391). Sotheby's New York, American Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture, March 15, 1995, Lot 59. Acquired by the present owner at the above sale. Joseph Lindon Smith is one of the most important figures from twentieth-century American Egyptology and his work has brought archaeological wonders, from Egypt and beyond, to people around the world. Smith's early career was as a portraitist rather than an archaeological painter. He was born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, and studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Académie Julian in Paris before opening a studio in Boston in 1885. He received consistent portrait commissions from elite patrons around New England, but throughout the 1880s and '90s he also displayed a keen interest in landscape and monument painting developed during decades of travel throughout Italy and Greece. Smith first visited Egypt in 1898. By this time he was already a well-known and successful artist, but his encounter with the pyramids, temples, and colossi of Giza and its environs would put his career on a new trajectory. He was struck by the immensity of history so evident in the Egyptian sites, later writing of his first encounter with the Great Sphinx that 'I sat in the hot sand and looked into that battered, mutilated face...and imagined the scene if all who had ever looked at the Sphinx were seated there about me.... What an enormous living carpet would cover the land as far as the eyes of the stone god would reach.' Although Smith would continue to travel all over the world throughout his career, Egypt became his most consistent and frequent destination. Smith's initial idea was to sell his Egyptian works to collectors and travelers; there was a strong market for such paintings particularly before the age of color photography. It was not long, though, before he was noticed by archaeologists and began to receive invitations to accompany excavations and paint newly discovered tombs. The most fateful encounter of Smith's career came in 1899, just one year after his first trip to Egypt, when he caught the attention of Phoebe Apperson Hearst. Hearst at the time was underwriting the Egyptian excavations of Dr. George Reisner, and she eagerly introduced the two men. Reisner too was struck by Smith's vivid and startlingly realistic paintings: 'Each painting is an archaeological record correct in details, but beautiful as a picture.' Smith and Reisner soon became close friends and colleagues, with Smith accompanying Reisner on his excavations and diligently painting his discoveries. After his encounter with Hearst and Reisner, Smith quickly gained a reputation in the Egyptological community for his visually stunning and wonderfully accurate depictions of monuments and tomb reliefs. During his 50-year career, he attended the excavations of the most important archaeologists of the 20th century, including Reisner, Howard Carter, and Arthur Weigall, often being among the first to enter a newly discovered tomb. These archaeologists, cognizant that most people never visit Egypt let alone see the inside of a tomb, recognized the potential of Smith's paintings to bring their findings to the wider world. Smith therefore provided glimpses into how the passageways, chambers, and reliefs looked at the time of their discovery, allowing scholars and the public to see and study rediscovered objects. His paintings remain some of the best documents of these objects' appearance in the first moments after their unearthing, capturing their often-damaged condition and the vestiges of their polychromatic brilliance. When not in Egypt or traveling elsewhere, Smith and his wife, the scholar and activist Corinna Haven Putnam, spent the summers at their home at Loon Point in Dublin, New Hampshire. There they entertained figures including Isabella Stewart Gardner, John Singer Sargent, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Mark Twain, and Amelia Earhart. They would continue their near annual trips Egypt for the rest of Smith's life. In 1947 Smith became the only living artist to be exhibited at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and in 1950 - the year of his death - he completed his final visit to Egypt. Throughout his career Smith maintained close ties to Harvard and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This relationship began in 1900, when Smith was commissioned by the MFA to paint the Alexander Sarcophagus that had been discovered in Lebanon a decade earlier. In 1905 Harvard and the MFA took over funding for Reisner's excavations and began buying Smith's works, hanging them above artifacts in the galleries to allow visitors to see the objects in situ. When Reisner became curator of the MFA's Egyptian collections in 1910, Smith became a formal member of the Harvard University-Boston Museum of Fine Arts Expedition. Reisner continued to acquire paintings for the museum until his passing in 1942. The present work, which was originally in the collection of the MFA, is an exceptional example of Smith's specialty: to-scale depictions of tomb reliefs. Here, Amenhotep III (ruled circa 1427-1401 BC), who ruled during the Eighteenth Dynasty, presents offerings in both hands. Just above the ruler's head is his Throne name, Nebmaatre, in a cartouche. The cartouche includes the hieroglyphs for a sun disk (Re), the seated goddess Maat with an ankh (life), and a basket (Possessor or Lord). The present work exemplifies Smith's trademark techniques, including his innovative use of dry paints to hide brushstrokes and augment depth and shadow. He captures each imperfection in the carving and every crack and chip in the stone surface. The painting is not a reproduction of how the relief might have looked in millennia ago, but rather a record of how it looked at the moment of its rediscovery. Smith wrote that, 'I regard my art as an interpreter of the past, rather than a mirror', reflecting his belief that the history of an object is composed of its entire lifetime, rather than just its original creation. Paintings like the present work remain unparalleled documents of not only Egyptian antiquities, but also of the history of Egyptology and archaeology itself. 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