Amice Calverley

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Amice Calverley (born April 9, 1896 in Chelsea , London , † April 10, 1959 in Toronto ) was a British painter and musician . She is known for her drawings of the temple of Seti I in Abydos .

The early years

Amice Mary Calverley was born in Chelsea, a borough of London. Her parents were Edmund Leveson Calverley and Sybil Salvin. She spent her childhood there until she moved to South Africa with her parents for a few years at the age of ten . On her return to England she studied art at the Slade School of Fine Art and piano with James Friskin. Then her family moved to Canada , where they settled in Oakville on Lake Ontario . She continued her music studies at the Toronto Conservatory of Music under Dr. Healey Willan gone. During the First World War she worked in a munitions factory and a hospital.

After the war she went to New York to study fashion and was employed by the Wanamaker department store. When she won a "Scholarship" at the Royal College of Music in 1922 , she returned to England. She studied with Vaughan Williams and her heart's desire was to write an opera. In 1926, she met the archaeologist Leonard Woolley in Oxford , who recognized her talent for drawing and encouraged her to turn to archaeological drawing instead of music. Amice got a job as a draftswoman at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. During this time she illustrated a book for the prehistorian Gordon Childe and in 1927 worked with Professor Aylward M. Blackman on photographs of the Temple of Seti I in Abydos for the Egypt Exploration Society (EES). This planned to create a photographic overview of the entire building with the unique wall paintings. When it turned out that the photographs could not live up to expectations, Amy and the high quality of her work were remembered. An ambitious plan for a more demanding publication began to emerge.

The artist and the temple of Seti I in Abydos

In 1927 Alan Henderson Gardiner was director of the Egypt Exploration Society. He hired Amice to start copying the murals in the huge temple complex. He had already promoted the work of Nina de Garis Davies and had an eye for good artists. In January, Amice Calverley traveled to Abydos and started her work.

Calverley broke new ground with her way of working. Using recordings with her Leica , she created Kodachrom slides . These were enlarged to the required scale of the relief or section and the outlines were then transferred to your drawing. Then she started mixing and applying the colors. Some were projected from the negative onto a drawing board so that the outlines could be drawn. Others were made on a larger scale in England and the outline drawings were taken to Egypt, where they were completed in the temple before the original. The later photographs were reinforced; In other words, she took low-contrast photos so that the result looked like a heavily retouched studio portrait. Their goal, however, was not to disguise unevenness, but to let them stand out on the old reliefs and inscriptions. The purpose of this ingenious procedure was to make all relevant features of a relief visible in a single image. Especially if the original is badly damaged, it may be impossible to see all of the significant features in a photo. B. different features are visible in different light. Calverley and Myrtle Broome also broke new ground in terms of color. They took monochrome color photos of the painted reliefs, which only reproduced the red of the originals. They took these prints to the wall and then painted all the other colors on them. This had the advantage that a high degree of proportional accuracy of the reliefs, both in size and in detail, was achieved in the copy.

Such a work did not allow any own form of expression. However, copying was exhausting and required intense concentration. Not every artist had the patience and perseverance that this work required, especially under the primitive conditions and the high temperatures that smeared the pencil and allowed the ink to dry out.

In the second year of their residency, John D. Rockefeller Jr. was in Egypt with his wife and son David and attended the temple with Professor James Henry Breasted from the University of Chicago . Rockefeller was deeply impressed, both by the beauty of the reliefs and by Amice Calverley's color copies. He agreed to fund the Temple's publication, to be jointly published by the Egypt Exploration Society and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. She became the head of the project and was able to hire the artist Myrtle F. Broome , with whom she worked side by side for many years. A young, talented photographer from Vienna also joined them temporarily. They received further support from Sir Alan Gardiner and the important Egyptologists Adriaan de Buck and Hermann Junker .

In a remote place like Abydos, the artists had to struggle with all sorts of difficulties and diseases such as typhoid. Calverley had had a mudbrick house built for her, a place where she lived for most of her life. She got to know and love her surroundings and relied on her five male Egyptian servants and her Syrian housekeeper. As a result, she maintained friendly relations with her neighbors, both the villagers and the official representatives of the government. Later, on a few days of the week, she held consultations for the villagers, treating sore babies, bandaging damaged joints, and providing simple medication for various ailments.

In 1933 the first splendid volume of her work was published with the chapels of Osiris, Isis and Horus. The second volume followed in 1935 with the chapels of Amun-Re, Re-Harachte, Ptah, and King Sethos and in 1938 the Osiris complex. In the printed edition, the color images were reproduced to an extraordinarily high standard by applying 7 - 8 colors (for comparison: today there are 4). Using “ spot colors ”, colors can be printed that are outside the color range possible with four-color printing . Despite the somewhat "artificial" impression of these painted photographs, it is doubtful whether they could be significantly improved as a faithful reproduction of the decorated walls.

Other interests

She learned to fly in the mid-1930s. When she was not in Egypt, she turned back to music. When she was in Austria in the summer of 1933, she wrote a quartet in F minor that was performed in Vienna, London and Canada. In Egypt she had a small 2-cylinder car that she drove to Cairo. At the end of the season it was loaded onto a ship that took them to Greece. From here she drove to Romania and other Balkan countries, where she filmed rural life. In 1938 he made a color film series in Egypt about folk dance and funeral and fertility rites.

The second World War

With the approach of World War II , she worked with Freya Stark in Cairo for the British Ministry of Information. Stark founded the democratic anti-fascist movement "Brotherhood of Freedom" here. Back in England in 1939 she worked as a driver for the Invalid Children's Aid Association , which evacuated children from cities to the countryside. In 1941 she was sent by the Ministry of Information to the Air Force, from where she came to Medmenham in Buckinghamshire after compulsory training to evaluate aerial photographs. In her spare time she was able to work on her unfinished drawings in the British Museum in London , which were housed in a cleared room. In 1944 she became a civilian employee in the Balkans.

Back in Egypt in 1947

After the end of the war, Rockefeller sent $ 17,000 for the Abydos project, so that Amice Calverley returned to Egypt with her new assistant, Miss Collis, in 1947. This was where cholera had broken out and Calverley campaigned for vaccine to be sent from Chicago to Abydos. Not only were their villagers vaccinated, but also around 750 British and Americans who were in Upper Egypt.

In the 1947-48 season, the Canadian Egyptologist Winifred Needler came to Abydos. She had taken a 10-month leave of absence from the Royal Ontario Museum to copy the inscriptions. She too had studied art and was an excellent draftsman and had studied hieroglyphics at Yale for a few semesters. She had also already created an Egyptian wall painting for the museum. That was the beginning of a deep friendship between the two women.

In autumn 1948, however, work in Abydos had to be stopped. The reason for this was the war between the Arab countries, including Egypt and the new state of Israel , so that the British government advised against expeditions to Egypt.

In Crete and Greece

Now Calverley roamed Crete and filmed the lives of the inhabitants, as they had already done in Egypt, sometimes on foot, sometimes in a former Canadian military truck. She took in weavers, potters, brickmakers or women who grind their grain, old men who spin on the street, fishermen who cast their nets.

She then went to Greece, where the civil war was raging, and reported on the battle of Mount Gramos in 1949 as a photographer and war correspondent . But she was soon nursing the wounded from this war and later received a badge from a Greek command. She tried to alleviate the suffering she experienced there by collecting money for the wounded veterans in Europe and America.

At home in Canada

When she returned to Canada, she bought a property on Lake Ontario in Oakville, which she converted. She herself lived in a former coach house, which became famous for her chamber orchestra concerts in the music circles of Toronto . Here she also worked on Volumes V and VI on the Sethos Temple, surrounded by the collections of her many travels.

In 1958 Amice Calverley wrote in the introduction to her fourth volume in the Abydos series:

“ I was very happy that all of the material survived the war unscathed, especially since both the material and those who had prepared it were within range of the hail of bombs. When the resumption became possible, the political situation in Egypt did not make things any easier, especially as there was fear of the cholera epidemic. It is with great relief and gratitude that I have completed this part of my assignment, and with the continued generosity of Mr. Rockefeller, I can begin volume five. "

Amice Calverley died suddenly and unexpectedly on April 10, 1959. Volume V remained unpublished.

"She was an outstanding artist for Abydos, as Nina de Garis Davies was for Theben-West." - This is how she describes Alan Henderson Gardiner, who had known and promoted both. In total, Amice Calverley had spent ten years in Abydos.

The Egypt Exploration Society is planning to publish Volume V on the temple of King Sethos I in Abydos, namely on the reliefs in the southern side of the temple, i. H. the barge hall, the chapels of Nefertem and Ptah-Sokar, the gallery with the list of kings and the staircase. Because many of the reliefs were not painted here, you could use the photos. After that there will still be material for three or four more volumes, because the EES photographic archive stores around 2000 glass negatives by Amice Calverley and Herbert Felton with comments that they recorded between 1925 and 1949. John Baines of Oxford University undertook this work and has been to Abydos several times since the 1970s and 1980s to check the epigraphic side. Due to the lack of financial resources, according to him, the appearance of a new volume is not foreseeable.

Works

literature

  • Winifred Needler, introduction to The Amice Mary Calverley Memorial Exhibition presented by the Art and Archeology Division of the Royal Ontario Museum. January 27th to February 21st 1960. Toronto 1960.

Web links

Commons : Reliefs in the mortuary temple of Seti I in Abydos  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ John Baines ( Memento January 4, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Calverley, Amice
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Calverley, Amice Mary (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British painter and copyist in the Temple of Set I in Abydos
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1896
PLACE OF BIRTH Chelsea , London
DATE OF DEATH April 10, 1959
Place of death Toronto Canada