The Fayyum portraits are a remarkable collection of around 900 mummy portraits surviving from the Graeco-Roman towns in the Fayyum in Egypt. They were originally bound in the wrappings of mummies, as a depiction of the deceased. Unlike most ancient art, these portraits represented relatively normal people as they looked during life. Of course, this was still an idealized version; nobody wants to be commemorated as old and frail. This is the case with this example: a man shown in his mid-thirties. He stares out from the boards with large, sympathetically rendered, almost sad, eyes. He has curly hair, and a short beard which covers his cheeks; thanks to the mercurial nature of Roman fashion, that helps us to date him to the Second Century AD, when emperors such as Hadrian sported the same look. The board is in poor condition, and most of the paint indicating his nose has been worn away by time. We can, however, still see that he was well-dressed, with a white toga with an orange or red stripe.

This portrait is painted in tempera on wood, which accounts for its poor preservation – in general, portraits painted in encaustic wax survive much better. It is nevertheless a good example of the highly regarded ancient art of panel painting, a medium in which the Greeks especially excelled, but with very few extant examples. The Fayyum portraits represent the only major corpus of Graeco-Roman panel painting, and so each one gives a valuable glimpse into a lost art form. In this example, we can see the artist’s use of short, choppy brushstrokes to represent the curl of the hair and beard, the variation of tone to give a sense of the fabric, the shadow below the full lips, and the longer brushstrokes around the eyes and cheeks.

It is natural to wonder about the man the portrait represents. Some Fayyum portraits have indications of the owner’s profession, with sword-belts for soldiers, and even the word for “ship-owner” on one example. There are sadly no indications here of the owner’s profession, and we are left to ponder without clues who this elite man with sad eyes might have been.