Pigment

A sheet of paper painted on one side by Flaxman Spurrell with ancient pigment collected from the ancient city of Tell el-Amarna by William Flinders Petrie in 1892. At one corner is the letter L indicating the pigment source from which a sample was taken and then lightly pulverized and mixed with gum arabic as a binder to make into paint. On the back annotated in ink, “coloured by crude granular haematite from Egypt. FCJ Spurrell”. This object is an example of the physical remains of Flaxman Spurrell’s experiments with ancient Egyptian colours which were published as an article, ‘Notes on Egyptian Colours’, in The Archaeological Journal 52 (1895), pages 222–39. The sheet is now folded into three.