look closer

The widow is doubled over against her husband's mummy case. Her hair is down and her bare feet are on the polished floor. She is doing none of the gestures a mourner was supposed to make.

An Egyptian funeral was a production with a cast list. The embalming took 70 days by the book, and the coffin was painted with the texts the dead would need. The mourning itself was partly a paid trade. Professional women were hired to wail, tear their hair, throw dust, and beat their breasts along the route to the tomb. 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. That is where the painted columns come from, and the black granite lion in the courtyard beyond. So do the winged scarab on the end of the sarcophagus, the sistrum, a metal rattle, raised over the mummy case, and the arched harp standing on the floor. 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 priests and singers are performing: shaved heads, mouths open, hands up, the correct gestures at the correct volume. Below them, alone, in dark blue, the widow is doubled over against the case with her hair down and her feet bare, 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. His first wife, Pauline, had died of smallpox at Schaerbeek three years earlier, aged 32; he stopped working for months, then left Belgium for London. The picture is at the Rijksmuseum, where the catalogue describes a widow mourning beside her husband's coffin while priests and singers lament.