| Summary: | Discovered by Vassalli in 1870, this painting was one of the first objects to find a place in the Cairo collection. It is also the earliest specimen of Egyptian pictorial art reproduced in the present work, and such is the mastery of its execution, such the craftsman's command of his materials, that it might well stand at the apex of the long centuries of achievement rather than at their base. The birds are closer to nature in their colouring than those of the later golden age of painting at Thebes, and for adequate comparison we must turn to the naturalistic art of El-Amarna (Plates LXXV, LXXVI). Similar processions of brown and grey geese, waddling along the canal banks of black mud fringed by the same variety of flowering rush, may be seen to-day by the wayfarer on the road from Giza to Medun; indeed, four of the geese might have been copied directly from their modem descendants. Three species are depicted, the White-fronted goose (Anser albifrons or erythropus, compare Plate VI), the Bean goose (Anser fabalis), and the Red breasted goose (Branta ruficollis). Such at least was Nicoll's opinion, but it is not easy to follow his distinction of the former two. The Red-breasted goose is no longer found in Egypt, though recorded as having been seen there as recently as 1874; the present habitat is northern Siberia. The flowers of the rush are brownish-yellow in reality, not bright red as in the picture. Subtler shades are used than we find elsewhere in Egyptian painting. Black mixed with white has produced grey, and mixed with red has produced a dull pink. Black has also been combined with yellow and red to form a dark brown, while shading with fine lines adds new tones to the feathers. The stippling of light red on the legs has yielded a far brighter tint than if the color had been applied opaquely, as upon the breasts. Though treated conventionally, the geese exhibit all essential details, and it is astonishing to find such fidelity to nature in work anterior to the Pyramids and going back almost five thousand years. Nothing so accomplished is known from the same date beyond the borders of Egypt. That the Medum geese were not an entirely isolated tour deforce on the part of their author is shown by the fragment of a gazelle from the same tomb; this is in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and is of extreme delicacy in both drawing and coloring. But hardly any other Old Kingdom site has produced paintings of comparable excellence.
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