Thutmose I and His Mother Seniseneb

Art Historical Context

This striking facsimile captures a tender royal scene from ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom, originally painted on the walls of a Theban tomb around 1479–1458 B.C. Created by British artist Nina de Garis Davies in 1925 using tempera on paper at exact one-to-one scale, it depicts Pharaoh Thutmose I alongside his mother, Seniseneb. The composition highlights the pharaoh’s regal bearing and the intimate bond between mother and son, rendered with the precise linework and vibrant pigments typical of 18th Dynasty tomb decoration. Davies was renowned for her meticulous copies of Egyptian wall paintings, which preserved details of color, hieroglyphs, and iconography at a time when many originals faced deterioration. Her work allows today’s visitors to appreciate the sophisticated artistic conventions of the period—idealized profiles, symbolic gestures, and inscriptions affirming divine kingship—without traveling to the tombs themselves. Housed in the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Egyptian Art, this facsimile serves as both a historical document and an educational bridge, connecting modern audiences to the cultural reverence for maternal lineage and royal legitimacy in ancient Egypt.

About the Artist

Nina de Garis Davies · 1881–1965

Nina de Garis Davies, born Anna Macpherson Cummings on January 6, 1881, in Salonika, Greece, to English-Scottish parents Cecil J. Cummings and Sarah Macintosh Tannoch, showed early artistic talent as the eldest of three daughters. After her father's death in 1894, the family relocated to Scotland and then London, where she trained at the Slade School of Art. In 1906, at age 25, a holiday trip to E...