Sandal Maker, Tomb of Rekhmire

Art Historical Context

In the opulent Tomb of Rekhmire (TT100) at Thebes, dating to Egypt's New Kingdom (ca. 1479–1400 B.C.), vivid wall paintings immortalized the daily labors of artisans, ensuring their crafts served the deceased vizier in the afterlife. facsimile captures a sandal maker at work—a skilled craftsman shaping leather soles and straps amid tools and hides—highlighting the meticulous division of labor in ancient Egyptian society. Rekhmire, a high-ranking official under pharaohs Thutmose III and Amenhotep II of Dynasty 18, commissioned these scenes to showcase prosperity and tribute-bearing workshops, offering rare glimpses into 18th Dynasty economies and trades. Artist Nina de Garis Davies meticulously recreated the original fresco-like painting in tempera on paper at a 1:1 scale around 1933, preserving its vibrant colors and precise details for modern viewers. Her watercolor facsimiles, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Egyptian Art collection (Rogers Fund, 1933), are celebrated for their archaeological accuracy, bridging ancient techniques—flat profiles, symbolic hierarchies, and earthy pigments—with 20th-century scholarship. These depictions underscore sandals' cultural role as everyday essentials and status symbols, woven from papyrus or leather. They reveal a thriving artisanal world, where such scenes educated tomb visitors on the pharaoh's divine order and the ingenuity sustaining it. A window into antiquity's heartbeat!

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...