Egyptian Splendor

Archaeologists discovered the tomb of Egypt's child-king, Tutankhamen, on this day in 1922, 3,000 years after his death at age nineteen.

Although the splendor of King Tut's royal tomb has fascinated many in the twentieth century, it was during the Victorian era that imagery featuring Egypt's exotic settings and stylized motifs reached its height of popularity.

Charles Pearce, who visited Egypt in 1873, based this scene on a passage from the biblical Book of Exodus, where a couple mourns the loss of their firstborn son, slaughtered by a vengeful pharaoh. The weeping parents shield their faces as they poise over the child's sarcophagus. At lower right, shattered children's toys refer to the tragic loss. In the Victorian era, when infant mortality was still prevalent and many parents endured the loss of a child, Pearce's Old Testament subject aroused all-too-modern feelings of grief.

Source: Richard Murray. The Gilded Age: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured top: Charles Sprague Pearce, 1851 USA–1914 France, Lamentations over the Death of the First-Born of Egypt, 1877, oil, 38 1/2 x 51 1/2 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.

Pictured bottom: Charles Sprague Pearce, Lamentations over the Death of the First-Born of Egypt (detail).