look closer

Face down in the dust at the end of the bier, doing none of the prescribed gestures. The polished floor between her and the others is the picture.

An Egyptian funeral was a production with a cast list. The embalming took 70 days by the book, the coffin was painted with the texts the dead would need, and the mourning itself was partly a paid trade: professional women were hired to keen, tear their hair, throw dust, and beat their breasts along the route to the tomb, and tomb paintings show them working in rows with their arms up in the same posture. Grief had a correct shape, and somebody could be engaged to perform it correctly. Alma-Tadema built this room out of research, as he built everything. He owned a large photographic archive of Egyptian material and used the British Museum the way a novelist uses a library: the painted columns, the black granite lion in the courtyard beyond, the coffin's lid with its face and its bands of text, the sistrum being shaken by one of the mourners, the ankh in another's hand. He was Dutch, trained in Antwerp, and made his name on archaeological accuracy at a moment when the public had just started to be able to check. What he does with the accuracy is the point of the picture. Along the right, the hired mourners are performing: mouths open, arms raised, the correct gestures at the correct volume, and one of them is glancing sideways to check the room. In the middle of the floor, alone, in dark blue, one woman has collapsed face down across the end of the bier with her hair in the dust, and she is not doing any of the prescribed movements. The composition puts an empty stretch of polished floor between her and everyone else, which is the loudest thing in the room. He painted it in 1872, four years after his first wife died of smallpox at 30. He had stopped working for months, and moved countries. The picture is at the Rijksmuseum, filed under his Egyptian period, and the catalogues describe it as a study of ancient burial customs.