of the kind of
art needed for people of small means, and we find among the medley of
commonplace objects which encumber the tomb they decorated, examples of
artistic works of undoubted excellence, such as the ladies Nai and Tui
now in the Louvre, the lady Nehai now at Berlin, and the naked child at
Turin. The lady Tui in her lifetime had been one of the singing-women of
Amon. She is clad in a tight-fitting robe, which accentuates the
contour of the breasts and hips without coarseness: her right arm falls
gracefully alongside her body, while her left, bent across her chest,
thrusts into her bosom a kind of magic whip, which was the sign of her
profession. The artist was not able to avoid a certain heaviness in the
treatment of her hair, and the careful execution of the whole work was
not without a degree of harshness, but by dint of scraping and polishing
the wood he succeeded in softening the outline, and removing from the
figure every sharp point. The lady Nehai is smarter and more graceful,
in her close-fitting garment and her mantle thrown over the left elbow;
and the artist has given her a more alert pose and resolute air than we
find in the stiff carriage of her contemporary Tui. The little girl in
the Turin Museum is a looser work, but where could one find a better
example of the lithe delicacy of the young Egyptian maiden of eight or
ten years old? We may see her counterpart to-day among the young Nubian
girls of the cataract, before they are obliged to wear clothes; there is
the same thin chest, the same undeveloped hips, the same meagre thighs,
and the same demeanour, at once innocent and audacious. Other statuettes
represent matrons, some in tight garments, and with their hair closely
confined, others without any garment whatever.

[Illustration: 043a.jpg a soldier]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by M. de Mertens.

[Illustration: 043b.jpg STATUE IN THE TURIN MUSEUM]

Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Petrie.

The Turin example is that of a lady who seems proud of her large
ear-rings, and brings one of them into prominence, either to show it
off or to satisfy herself that the jewel becomes her: her head is
square-shaped, the shoulders narrow, the chest puny, the pose of the
arm stiff and awkward, but the eyes have such a joyful openness, and her
smile such a self-satisfied expression, that one readily over looks the
other defects of the statue. In this collection of miniature figures