Egyptian girl standing

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought Egypt back to the forefront of the international scene, giving fresh impetus to the Egyptomony that had gripped the arts since the end of the previous century. Statuary was also influenced by this movement, and followed the lead of the archaeological painters of the second half of the 19th century, seeking to appropriate the ancient Egyptian models seen in recent works by Egyptologists or in the Louvre department, open since 1827. Alongside highly ambitious works, such as Charles Cordier's life-size Harp-playing Priestess of Isis, exhibited at the Salon of 1874, an amiable creation flourished between orientalism and archaeology, in the wake of the neo-Greek movement, depicting ancient Egyptians seated on a sphinx or playing an instrument, with sculptors Gaston Leroux and Charles Coudray as specialists. Jean-Baptiste-Alexandre Billard de Saint-Laumer uses a similar vocabulary in this small statuette of an Egyptian woman dressed in an antique-style loincloth and wearing a nemes, a typical Egyptian cloth headdress, holding a canopic vase designed to receive the viscera of the deceased.
Jean-Baptiste-Alexandre Billard de Saint-Laumer was originally destined for a military career. Nevertheless, he left Saint-Cyr to join the workshops of sculptors Ramey and Dumont, before returning to Chartres, recalled by his family. There, he pursued an administrative career, serving as mayor of Chartres twice between 1865 and 1870, and again between 1874 and 1876. It was through the intermediary of the Marcille brothers, Eudoxe, director of the Musée d'Orléans, and Camille, director of the Musée de Chartres, that this statuette entered the collections, much to the astonishment of its creator, who did not consider his work worthy of display in a museum. From 1870 to 1890, Eudoxe Marcille worked to enrich the collections with artists representing the modern school.