Ancient Egypt
The Painter of Nebamun (1390 BCE–1350 BCE)
Egyptian New Kingdom Tomb painter.
The Painter of Nebamun is the conventional name for the anonymous workshop that decorated the lost Theban tomb-chapel of Nebamun, a grain accountant in the Temple of Amun, around 1350 BCE — late Eighteenth Dynasty, in the reign of Amenhotep III. The dates here bracket that commission, not a documented life. The chapel itself is lost; eleven plaster fragments, cut from the walls in the early nineteenth century, are now in the British Museum. They are among the most vivid survivals of New Kingdom tomb painting.
The paintings are mineral pigment bound in a glue medium on mud plaster — a secco technique, not true buon fresco — laid out on the Egyptian canon of proportions. What distinguishes this workshop is the liveliness inside that canon: a cat lunging through papyrus, a pool garden seen as if from above, cattle and geese counted before the tomb owner. Richard Parkinson's British Museum monograph is the standard account of the fragments, their original chapel, and their conservation.
No painter is named. The tomb owner's titles survive on the fragments; the hands that painted them do not. The convention of a single 'Painter of Nebamun' is curatorial: one chapel, one workshop, one of the peaks of Theban wall painting.
The words the record keeps using: vivid, marshy, hieratic, lively, sunlit, precise.
At a glance
- Lived 1390 BCE–1350 BCE
- Origin Egyptian
- Worked in Thebes (Waset)
- Era Ancient Egypt
- Movements New Kingdom Tomb Painting
- Mediums Fresco
- Techniques Egyptian canon of proportions
Works in the archive
- Hunting in the Marshes, Tomb of Nebamun, 1350 BCE (British Museum, London (EA 37977))
Nebamun stands on a papyrus skiff, throwing stick in hand, among birds, fish, and a hunting cat. It is the most reproduced fragment from the lost chapel and the type-image of New Kingdom marsh hunting. Parkinson treats… - Viewing the Produce of the Estates (Cattle), 1350 BCE (British Museum, London (EA 37976))
Cattle are driven and counted before Nebamun — the tomb owner's inspection of estate produce, a standard Theban subject here painted with individual animals rather than a repeated type. (A widely circulated Met image… - Pool in Nebamun's Garden, 1350 BCE (British Museum, London (EA 37983))
A rectangular garden pool seen as if from above, stocked with fish and birds and framed by trees drawn in profile — date palms, sycamores, and mandrakes. Parkinson discusses it as a complete small world: the tomb…
What was said
Parkinson reconstructs the lost Theban chapel from the eleven British Museum fragments and from Theban tomb convention: hunting, estate produce, garden, and banquet as a programme for an official's afterlife, not as unrelated pictures.
The fragments are mineral pigment in a glue medium on mud plaster — a secco wall painting laid out on the Egyptian proportional canon — not true lime fresco; the workshop's distinction is the observation allowed inside that grid.
No painter is named on the fragments; the British Museum monograph treats them as the work of a Theban workshop commissioned for Nebamun, a grain accountant in the Temple of Amun, around the reign of Amenhotep III.
What would The Painter of Nebamun make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after The Painter of Nebamun", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with The Painter of Nebamun · Keep a life moment the way The Painter of Nebamun would · Pictures made after The Painter of Nebamun