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Lot Essay
One of the earliest works of art from ancient Egypt to arrive in England, this magnificent Old Kingdom statue of Mehernefer and his son was first presented to King George III as a gift from the Ambassador in Constantinople, Sir James Porter, during his appointment which lasted from 1746 to 1761. King George III subsequently donated the statue to Thomas Worsley (1797-1885) at Hovingham Hall, where it remained ever since. This masterfully carved statue reflects the style of 5th Dynasty royal portraiture from Memphite workshops, which established the canons for subsequent generations of Egyptian art.
SIR JAMES PORTER (1710-1786) AND THE CONSTANTINOPLE CONNECTION
Born in Dublin in 1710, Porter was the son of a Captain of the Horse under James II. His studies and early life took him to London where he developed a love of mathematics, languages, debating and the theatre. Through family connections he was introduced to Lord Carteret, later Earl Granville, who in the 1730s recommended Porter for confidential missions to Europe connected with continental commerce. In 1741 he was working alongside Sir Thomas Robinson, the British minister at Vienna, involved in the diplomatic crisis at the death of the Emperor Charles VI, and the accession of Maria Theresa.
In 1746, he was appointed ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire in what was then Constantinople. He wrote his memoirs Turkey: Its History and Progress. Journals and Correspondence of Sir James Porter, published in 1854, and in a later addition his grandson mentions that Porter “established a character for fair dealing…pursuing his favourite studies and carrying on a correspondence with the most eminent scientific and literary men of his day, he passed a useful and easy life at Constantinople”. After 16 years residence at Constantinople, he returned briefly to Britain in May 1762, and was then appointed as British Minister to Brussels, accepting a knighthood in 1764. Returning finally to England in 1765, he retired to live a quiet family life, between his London house and a villa in Ham, near Richmond, where, amongst many others, he became a close acquaintance of Lord Bessborough, the famous collector of ancient gems and classical sculpture.
GEORGE III (1738-1820) AND HIS TASTE IN COLLECTING
The grandson of George II, George had acceded to the throne in 1760 after the death of his grandfather, as his father, the Prince of Wales had predeceased him. Since the age of 12 he had been guided by the 3rd Earl of Bute (an old school friend of Worsley’s) who had sparked an interest in the future king for the sciences and the arts. Shortly after coming to the throne he purchased not only the entire library belonging to Consul Joseph Smith, a British diplomat in Venice, but also his first class collection of medals, engraved gems, prints, drawings and paintings, including many outstanding works by Canaletto. The books, known as the “King’s Library”, are now found in the British Library. In the 1760s he had also purchased the Albani collection of drawings including many fine pieces by Domenichino and the Carracci. It has also been suggested that the famous Michelangelo and Raphael drawings came into the Royal Collection thanks to George III.
There are over 7000 works of art listed as being acquired or commissioned by George III and his wife Queen Charlotte. The King himself was keen to support the arts and was patron of several prominent artists of the day including Thomas Gainsborough, Johann Zoffany and Benjamin West. In 1768, thanks to King George’s patronage, the Royal Academy of Arts was established – even giving this new society the use of one of his palaces – Somerset House.
THOMAS WORSLEY (1711-1778), THE ARCHITECT AND THE HORSEMAN
Thomas Worsley was educated at Eton and in Geneva, and began his career as equerry-in-ordinary to George II from 1742-1760. In 1760, thanks to his old school friend the Third Earl of Bute, who was then Prime Minister, he was appointed Surveyor-General of the Office of Works, a post he held until 1778. In this role he became close to George III, who was a like-minded keen horseman and architectural enthusiast. No doubt because of their great friendship, in 1762 the monarch gifted him Giambologna's sculptural group Samson and the Philistine, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In this light it is perhaps no surprise that George III also gifted Worsley this precious Old Kingdom statue. After the death of his father in 1751 Worsley spent the rest of his life designing and rebuilding Hovingham Hall, the family home in Yorkshire since 1563, as a Palladian dynastic seat, a trip to Florence between 1739-40 providing the inspiration for the amateur architect.
THE STATUE AND EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES IN BRITAIN
This remarkable sculpture had arrived in England over 30 years prior to the discovery of the Rosetta stone by the French in 1799, and its subsequent confiscation by the British and presentation to George III in 1802. In fact the first Egyptian antiquities gifted to the British Museum, and forming the basis of their Egyptian department, had only been given by Sir Hans Sloane in 1753. The Petrie Museum was established over a century later in 1892.
However, people’s curiosity with Egyptian artefacts had begun much earlier than the excavations that had followed Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (1798-1802). At the beginning of the 16th century many a European gentleman’s Cabinet of Curiosity would feature an Egyptian artefact, mummified animal or human sarcophagus. It was not until the 18th Century that an interest in Egyptian art became a more formalised pursuit with the founding of the Egyptian Society in London in 1741. Established by a group of British amateurs who had travelled to Egypt or owned private collections of ancient Egyptian objects, they met to display and discuss their collections and interests. The Society’s members included Captain William Lethieullier (1701-1756) and Dr Richard Mead (1673-1754), physician to Queen Anne and George II.
Among the earliest works of Old Kingdom art to arrive in an English collection, this statue group and a related pair statue were described in Thomas Worsley’s 1778 catalogue of works of art at Hovingham Hall as “Two Egyptian idols Isis & Osiris brought by Sir James Porter from Constantinople & given by him to King George III who gave them to me.” Displayed since the eighteenth century alongside Giambologna’s “Samson and a Philistine,” as well as ancient busts and plaster casts, the statues were acquired at a period prior to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and before the iconographic traits of Egyptian art were well understood. Accordingly the fragments of both sculpture groups were misunderstood and crudely restored during the 18th century with heads attached to the incorrect bodies, leading to the false impression that the groups depicted the gods Isis and her brother/husband Osiris, rather than two family groups of Old Kingdom individuals. A modern reappraisal by Egyptologists Cyril Aldred and I. E. S. Edwards (among others) allowed the correct interpretation and successful restoration of the two groups.
An article on Hovingham in Country Life Magazine in 1927 focused more on the architectural merits rather than on the Grand Tour Collections. The Egyptian statue was to remain unpublished until it was listed in 1955 by C. Vermeule in his 'Notes on a New Edition of Michaelis' in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1955 – even Adolf Michaelis had not mentioned it in Ancient Marbles of Great Britain.
THE HOVINGHAM HALL GROUP: MEHERNEFER AND HIS SON
Magnificently carved from a single block of fine limestone, this statue group depicts a seated man in classic Old Kingdom style alongside a standing image of his young son. The powerful physique of the father expresses his virility, an aspect underscored by the presence of his eldest son, shown standing nude and leaning on his father. Traces of inscription on the right side of the base of the group statue reveal that the seated man was probably called [Meh-er-]nefer, the same name also given to his eldest son, as indicated in the well-preserved inscription to the left of the small boy’s feet. Egyptian artistic convention emphasizes the higher status of the seated figure in a group, and the father is here represented on a block seat, flanked on one side by his young son and, in all likelihood, once accompanied by a standing figure of his wife (now missing).
Despite his youthful depiction, the inscription accompanying the boy identifies him as the “God’s Servant/Prophet of Wadjet and King’s Agent in Nubia, Meh-er-nefer”. The title of “King’s Agent in Nubia” (literally “the hand of He who Appears in the Land of the Bow”) was apparently a lofty position, associated with a series of important individuals during the later Old Kingdom involved in the administration of southernmost Egypt and Nubia. In all likelihood, this statue group representing the King’s Agent Meh-er-nefer as a boy alongside his parents was placed in his own tomb, accompanied by another pair statue, also received by Thomas Worsley at Hovingham at the same time, dedicated by his father of the same name to his own parents, a testimonial to enduring filial piety, see B. Porter and R. L. B. Moss, Royal Statues. Private Statues: Predynastic to the end of Dynasty XVII, Vol. VIII, Part I, 1999, p. 261, no. 801-203-610. The original findspot is not known, but the inscriptions on both group statues indicate that they are closely related, most likely representing three generations of the same family, and were in all likelihood discovered in an enclosed serdab chamber within a mastaba tomb at either Giza or Saqqara. The second group, a standing pair statue of a man named Neb-ef-wi and his wife Mes-Sat, bears inscriptions indicating that it was dedicated by their beloved eldest son, “the Chief Companion of the Palace (or Iz(et)-Chamber) in Nekheb (El-Kab), Meh-er-nefer,” who is named on the top face of the statue base. It is most likely this is the same Meh-er-nefer whose imposing figure is seated alongside his young son.
The name Meh-er-nefer does not seem to be attested from any known monuments, although an Old Kingdom tomb (S11) of a man with the similar name Meh-nefer(?) is known from the provincial site of Sharuna (W. Schenkel and F. Gomaa, Scharuna I: der Grabungsplatz, die Nekropole, Gräber aus der Alten-Reichs-Nekropole, Band I, Mainz, 2004, p. 152 ff.). Neither do the names of Meh-er-nefer’s parents provide any real insight into the original location of the family burial, although his father’s name Neb-ef-wi, written with the extremely unusual hieroglyph of a swimmer, does seem to occur above the depiction of a figure cooking a goose shown in a tomb at Hemamieh in Middle Egypt (E. Mackay et al., 'Bahrein and Hemamieh', British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1929, pl. XXIII, top). These indications, combined with the Upper Egyptian and Nubian associations of the titles of both men named Meh-er-nefer may perhaps indicate a sphere of influence that extended far beyond the northern capital at Memphis, and an origin for the works from a tomb at a provincial location cannot be excluded, despite the quality and style of the statues that would seem to indicate their origin in a Memphite workshop capable of producing works such as this one of extremely high quality.
The father sits on a stylized block seat, his left hand open on his leg, while his right hand (now missing) would once have likely held an attenuated object with a round end representing his staff of office. Both figures are masterfully rendered, with accentuated pectoral muscles. The dominant seated figure features a taut stomach divided by a central hollow ending at the navel. The boy is represented nude and with the characteristic sidelock of youth, here with the curl turned inwards onto his chest and not in the more usual outward-facing position at the top of the arm. He holds the index finger of his right hand to his mouth in the standard Egyptian gesture of youth, and affectionately rests his bent left arm behind his father’s back, with his hand resting on his shoulder. The figure of the boy is sculpted almost entirely in the round, with a back pillar (partly restored) rising from his father’s seat to support the boy’s head.
The youthful and rounded forms of the boy’s childish body indicate his young age, while the depiction of his uncircumcised penis indicates that he had not yet gone through the Egyptian rites of initiation into adulthood, see O. Goelet, “Nudity in Ancient Egypt,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, vol. 12, no. 2, Winter, 1993, pp. 20-31. The boy’s stomach is convex and softly rounded. The knees and shins of the adult male are modelled with attention to anatomy, contrasting with the undefined muscles of the immature boy. The father’s wig is crisply rendered in curls en echelon, with the face of the man set partly in shadow below the helmet-like form of his hairstyle. Both faces are rounded, with naturally rendered eyebrows and eyes outlined in sharp relief. The mouths of both figures feature a sharply delineated vermilion line. Some traces of red paint are preserved from the exposed skin of the figures. The facial features of this private statue group reflect the style of Dynasty V royal portraiture from Memphite workshops, reflecting the style of portraiture set by Userkaf, the founder of that dynasty, and elaborated later in the dynasty by Neferefre in his sculpture from his Abusir monuments.
As John Cooney has remarked, “the final development of the pair statue into a family group including children took place in the 5th Dynasty reaching its fullest development in the second half of that dynasty.”, see J. Cooney, 'Three Egyptian Families of the Old Kingdom', Brooklyn Museum Bulletin, 13:3, Spring 1952, p.1. One of the family groups discussed by Cooney, the group statue of Ny-ka-ra and family (Brooklyn Museum 49.215), has been dated to late Dynasty V, and presents a close guide to the probable original appearance of the Meh-er-nefer family group. As in the Hovingham group statue, Ny-ka-ra’s son stands alongside his father, placing his hand on his shoulder. Similarly, Ny-ka-ra’s son son Ankh-ma-ra also bears a title, “Scribe of the Granary” that is more appropriate for an adult, indicating that the inscription was added at a later stage in his life. Based on the parallel to the Ny-ka-ra family group, and examination of the visible traces, it seems likely that the standing figure of the nude boy was balanced by a standing figure, most likely that of his mother, the wife of the seated man. The traces of hieroglyphic inscription on the base to the figure’s proper left have been cut through, perhaps in order to finish off the group to appear as mostly intact from the front.
Faint but strong vertical lines along the front and back of the seated man’s left arm are likely indications that another figure stood directly alongside him. A tell-tale feature is the angled treatment of the left side of the seat, and also the slight modelling of the left leg as seen in profile. Had this side been more accessible to the sculptor, it would have been robustly finished as it was on the proper right side, but it was very likely obstructed by the now-missing figure, which would have been slightly set back from the front of the block seat, forming a symmetrical composition with the figure of the younger Meh-er-nefer. The broken area along the left arm of the seated man may reflect attachment to a (now missing) figure of a standing woman with legs together. The pair statue of Demedji seated alongside his standing wife Hennutsen in the Metropolitan Museum (MMA 51.37) also dates to Dynasty V and may provide some impression of the original appearance of the missing female figure and its relationship to the dominant figure of the seated Meh-er-nefer. Although one might have expected the hand of the wife to have embraced the figure of her husband, Nadine Cherpion has noted that affection is less commonly represented in Egyptian scenes of husband and wife in later Dynasty V, and not all representations reflect physical intimacy or connection, see N. Cherpion, 'Sentiment conjugal et figuration à l’Ancien Empire' in Kunst des Alten Reichs, SDAIK 28, Mainz am Rhein, 1995, pp. 33-47.
It is entirely possible that the removal of the third figure of the group occurred during antiquity, although it cannot be excluded that damage to the proper left part of the group could have led to the chiselling away in more recent centuries of the damaged surfaces, in an effort perhaps to create a neater impression. However, the intentional execration of the name and image of a wife is a well-attested phenomenon during the Old Kingdom, and also occurs in the recently discovered Dynasty V tomb of Wahti at Saqqara, a circumstance that may reflect divorce, a loss of favour, or some other change in social status. Given the fact that the figure of the young boy is endowed with lofty titles that do not fit the young age of his nude figure, it is possible that the inscriptions were added and the family group adapted for placement in a family tomb, enabling the statue group to reflect changes in the younger Meh-er-nefer’s status and family situation.
SIR JAMES PORTER (1710-1786) AND THE CONSTANTINOPLE CONNECTION
Born in Dublin in 1710, Porter was the son of a Captain of the Horse under James II. His studies and early life took him to London where he developed a love of mathematics, languages, debating and the theatre. Through family connections he was introduced to Lord Carteret, later Earl Granville, who in the 1730s recommended Porter for confidential missions to Europe connected with continental commerce. In 1741 he was working alongside Sir Thomas Robinson, the British minister at Vienna, involved in the diplomatic crisis at the death of the Emperor Charles VI, and the accession of Maria Theresa.
In 1746, he was appointed ambassador to the Sublime Porte of the Ottoman Empire in what was then Constantinople. He wrote his memoirs Turkey: Its History and Progress. Journals and Correspondence of Sir James Porter, published in 1854, and in a later addition his grandson mentions that Porter “established a character for fair dealing…pursuing his favourite studies and carrying on a correspondence with the most eminent scientific and literary men of his day, he passed a useful and easy life at Constantinople”. After 16 years residence at Constantinople, he returned briefly to Britain in May 1762, and was then appointed as British Minister to Brussels, accepting a knighthood in 1764. Returning finally to England in 1765, he retired to live a quiet family life, between his London house and a villa in Ham, near Richmond, where, amongst many others, he became a close acquaintance of Lord Bessborough, the famous collector of ancient gems and classical sculpture.
GEORGE III (1738-1820) AND HIS TASTE IN COLLECTING
The grandson of George II, George had acceded to the throne in 1760 after the death of his grandfather, as his father, the Prince of Wales had predeceased him. Since the age of 12 he had been guided by the 3rd Earl of Bute (an old school friend of Worsley’s) who had sparked an interest in the future king for the sciences and the arts. Shortly after coming to the throne he purchased not only the entire library belonging to Consul Joseph Smith, a British diplomat in Venice, but also his first class collection of medals, engraved gems, prints, drawings and paintings, including many outstanding works by Canaletto. The books, known as the “King’s Library”, are now found in the British Library. In the 1760s he had also purchased the Albani collection of drawings including many fine pieces by Domenichino and the Carracci. It has also been suggested that the famous Michelangelo and Raphael drawings came into the Royal Collection thanks to George III.
There are over 7000 works of art listed as being acquired or commissioned by George III and his wife Queen Charlotte. The King himself was keen to support the arts and was patron of several prominent artists of the day including Thomas Gainsborough, Johann Zoffany and Benjamin West. In 1768, thanks to King George’s patronage, the Royal Academy of Arts was established – even giving this new society the use of one of his palaces – Somerset House.
THOMAS WORSLEY (1711-1778), THE ARCHITECT AND THE HORSEMAN
Thomas Worsley was educated at Eton and in Geneva, and began his career as equerry-in-ordinary to George II from 1742-1760. In 1760, thanks to his old school friend the Third Earl of Bute, who was then Prime Minister, he was appointed Surveyor-General of the Office of Works, a post he held until 1778. In this role he became close to George III, who was a like-minded keen horseman and architectural enthusiast. No doubt because of their great friendship, in 1762 the monarch gifted him Giambologna's sculptural group Samson and the Philistine, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In this light it is perhaps no surprise that George III also gifted Worsley this precious Old Kingdom statue. After the death of his father in 1751 Worsley spent the rest of his life designing and rebuilding Hovingham Hall, the family home in Yorkshire since 1563, as a Palladian dynastic seat, a trip to Florence between 1739-40 providing the inspiration for the amateur architect.
THE STATUE AND EGYPTIAN ANTIQUITIES IN BRITAIN
This remarkable sculpture had arrived in England over 30 years prior to the discovery of the Rosetta stone by the French in 1799, and its subsequent confiscation by the British and presentation to George III in 1802. In fact the first Egyptian antiquities gifted to the British Museum, and forming the basis of their Egyptian department, had only been given by Sir Hans Sloane in 1753. The Petrie Museum was established over a century later in 1892.
However, people’s curiosity with Egyptian artefacts had begun much earlier than the excavations that had followed Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign (1798-1802). At the beginning of the 16th century many a European gentleman’s Cabinet of Curiosity would feature an Egyptian artefact, mummified animal or human sarcophagus. It was not until the 18th Century that an interest in Egyptian art became a more formalised pursuit with the founding of the Egyptian Society in London in 1741. Established by a group of British amateurs who had travelled to Egypt or owned private collections of ancient Egyptian objects, they met to display and discuss their collections and interests. The Society’s members included Captain William Lethieullier (1701-1756) and Dr Richard Mead (1673-1754), physician to Queen Anne and George II.
Among the earliest works of Old Kingdom art to arrive in an English collection, this statue group and a related pair statue were described in Thomas Worsley’s 1778 catalogue of works of art at Hovingham Hall as “Two Egyptian idols Isis & Osiris brought by Sir James Porter from Constantinople & given by him to King George III who gave them to me.” Displayed since the eighteenth century alongside Giambologna’s “Samson and a Philistine,” as well as ancient busts and plaster casts, the statues were acquired at a period prior to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and before the iconographic traits of Egyptian art were well understood. Accordingly the fragments of both sculpture groups were misunderstood and crudely restored during the 18th century with heads attached to the incorrect bodies, leading to the false impression that the groups depicted the gods Isis and her brother/husband Osiris, rather than two family groups of Old Kingdom individuals. A modern reappraisal by Egyptologists Cyril Aldred and I. E. S. Edwards (among others) allowed the correct interpretation and successful restoration of the two groups.
An article on Hovingham in Country Life Magazine in 1927 focused more on the architectural merits rather than on the Grand Tour Collections. The Egyptian statue was to remain unpublished until it was listed in 1955 by C. Vermeule in his 'Notes on a New Edition of Michaelis' in the American Journal of Archaeology in 1955 – even Adolf Michaelis had not mentioned it in Ancient Marbles of Great Britain.
THE HOVINGHAM HALL GROUP: MEHERNEFER AND HIS SON
Magnificently carved from a single block of fine limestone, this statue group depicts a seated man in classic Old Kingdom style alongside a standing image of his young son. The powerful physique of the father expresses his virility, an aspect underscored by the presence of his eldest son, shown standing nude and leaning on his father. Traces of inscription on the right side of the base of the group statue reveal that the seated man was probably called [Meh-er-]nefer, the same name also given to his eldest son, as indicated in the well-preserved inscription to the left of the small boy’s feet. Egyptian artistic convention emphasizes the higher status of the seated figure in a group, and the father is here represented on a block seat, flanked on one side by his young son and, in all likelihood, once accompanied by a standing figure of his wife (now missing).
Despite his youthful depiction, the inscription accompanying the boy identifies him as the “God’s Servant/Prophet of Wadjet and King’s Agent in Nubia, Meh-er-nefer”. The title of “King’s Agent in Nubia” (literally “the hand of He who Appears in the Land of the Bow”) was apparently a lofty position, associated with a series of important individuals during the later Old Kingdom involved in the administration of southernmost Egypt and Nubia. In all likelihood, this statue group representing the King’s Agent Meh-er-nefer as a boy alongside his parents was placed in his own tomb, accompanied by another pair statue, also received by Thomas Worsley at Hovingham at the same time, dedicated by his father of the same name to his own parents, a testimonial to enduring filial piety, see B. Porter and R. L. B. Moss, Royal Statues. Private Statues: Predynastic to the end of Dynasty XVII, Vol. VIII, Part I, 1999, p. 261, no. 801-203-610. The original findspot is not known, but the inscriptions on both group statues indicate that they are closely related, most likely representing three generations of the same family, and were in all likelihood discovered in an enclosed serdab chamber within a mastaba tomb at either Giza or Saqqara. The second group, a standing pair statue of a man named Neb-ef-wi and his wife Mes-Sat, bears inscriptions indicating that it was dedicated by their beloved eldest son, “the Chief Companion of the Palace (or Iz(et)-Chamber) in Nekheb (El-Kab), Meh-er-nefer,” who is named on the top face of the statue base. It is most likely this is the same Meh-er-nefer whose imposing figure is seated alongside his young son.
The name Meh-er-nefer does not seem to be attested from any known monuments, although an Old Kingdom tomb (S11) of a man with the similar name Meh-nefer(?) is known from the provincial site of Sharuna (W. Schenkel and F. Gomaa, Scharuna I: der Grabungsplatz, die Nekropole, Gräber aus der Alten-Reichs-Nekropole, Band I, Mainz, 2004, p. 152 ff.). Neither do the names of Meh-er-nefer’s parents provide any real insight into the original location of the family burial, although his father’s name Neb-ef-wi, written with the extremely unusual hieroglyph of a swimmer, does seem to occur above the depiction of a figure cooking a goose shown in a tomb at Hemamieh in Middle Egypt (E. Mackay et al., 'Bahrein and Hemamieh', British School of Archaeology in Egypt, 1929, pl. XXIII, top). These indications, combined with the Upper Egyptian and Nubian associations of the titles of both men named Meh-er-nefer may perhaps indicate a sphere of influence that extended far beyond the northern capital at Memphis, and an origin for the works from a tomb at a provincial location cannot be excluded, despite the quality and style of the statues that would seem to indicate their origin in a Memphite workshop capable of producing works such as this one of extremely high quality.
The father sits on a stylized block seat, his left hand open on his leg, while his right hand (now missing) would once have likely held an attenuated object with a round end representing his staff of office. Both figures are masterfully rendered, with accentuated pectoral muscles. The dominant seated figure features a taut stomach divided by a central hollow ending at the navel. The boy is represented nude and with the characteristic sidelock of youth, here with the curl turned inwards onto his chest and not in the more usual outward-facing position at the top of the arm. He holds the index finger of his right hand to his mouth in the standard Egyptian gesture of youth, and affectionately rests his bent left arm behind his father’s back, with his hand resting on his shoulder. The figure of the boy is sculpted almost entirely in the round, with a back pillar (partly restored) rising from his father’s seat to support the boy’s head.
The youthful and rounded forms of the boy’s childish body indicate his young age, while the depiction of his uncircumcised penis indicates that he had not yet gone through the Egyptian rites of initiation into adulthood, see O. Goelet, “Nudity in Ancient Egypt,” Source: Notes in the History of Art, vol. 12, no. 2, Winter, 1993, pp. 20-31. The boy’s stomach is convex and softly rounded. The knees and shins of the adult male are modelled with attention to anatomy, contrasting with the undefined muscles of the immature boy. The father’s wig is crisply rendered in curls en echelon, with the face of the man set partly in shadow below the helmet-like form of his hairstyle. Both faces are rounded, with naturally rendered eyebrows and eyes outlined in sharp relief. The mouths of both figures feature a sharply delineated vermilion line. Some traces of red paint are preserved from the exposed skin of the figures. The facial features of this private statue group reflect the style of Dynasty V royal portraiture from Memphite workshops, reflecting the style of portraiture set by Userkaf, the founder of that dynasty, and elaborated later in the dynasty by Neferefre in his sculpture from his Abusir monuments.
As John Cooney has remarked, “the final development of the pair statue into a family group including children took place in the 5th Dynasty reaching its fullest development in the second half of that dynasty.”, see J. Cooney, 'Three Egyptian Families of the Old Kingdom', Brooklyn Museum Bulletin, 13:3, Spring 1952, p.1. One of the family groups discussed by Cooney, the group statue of Ny-ka-ra and family (Brooklyn Museum 49.215), has been dated to late Dynasty V, and presents a close guide to the probable original appearance of the Meh-er-nefer family group. As in the Hovingham group statue, Ny-ka-ra’s son stands alongside his father, placing his hand on his shoulder. Similarly, Ny-ka-ra’s son son Ankh-ma-ra also bears a title, “Scribe of the Granary” that is more appropriate for an adult, indicating that the inscription was added at a later stage in his life. Based on the parallel to the Ny-ka-ra family group, and examination of the visible traces, it seems likely that the standing figure of the nude boy was balanced by a standing figure, most likely that of his mother, the wife of the seated man. The traces of hieroglyphic inscription on the base to the figure’s proper left have been cut through, perhaps in order to finish off the group to appear as mostly intact from the front.
Faint but strong vertical lines along the front and back of the seated man’s left arm are likely indications that another figure stood directly alongside him. A tell-tale feature is the angled treatment of the left side of the seat, and also the slight modelling of the left leg as seen in profile. Had this side been more accessible to the sculptor, it would have been robustly finished as it was on the proper right side, but it was very likely obstructed by the now-missing figure, which would have been slightly set back from the front of the block seat, forming a symmetrical composition with the figure of the younger Meh-er-nefer. The broken area along the left arm of the seated man may reflect attachment to a (now missing) figure of a standing woman with legs together. The pair statue of Demedji seated alongside his standing wife Hennutsen in the Metropolitan Museum (MMA 51.37) also dates to Dynasty V and may provide some impression of the original appearance of the missing female figure and its relationship to the dominant figure of the seated Meh-er-nefer. Although one might have expected the hand of the wife to have embraced the figure of her husband, Nadine Cherpion has noted that affection is less commonly represented in Egyptian scenes of husband and wife in later Dynasty V, and not all representations reflect physical intimacy or connection, see N. Cherpion, 'Sentiment conjugal et figuration à l’Ancien Empire' in Kunst des Alten Reichs, SDAIK 28, Mainz am Rhein, 1995, pp. 33-47.
It is entirely possible that the removal of the third figure of the group occurred during antiquity, although it cannot be excluded that damage to the proper left part of the group could have led to the chiselling away in more recent centuries of the damaged surfaces, in an effort perhaps to create a neater impression. However, the intentional execration of the name and image of a wife is a well-attested phenomenon during the Old Kingdom, and also occurs in the recently discovered Dynasty V tomb of Wahti at Saqqara, a circumstance that may reflect divorce, a loss of favour, or some other change in social status. Given the fact that the figure of the young boy is endowed with lofty titles that do not fit the young age of his nude figure, it is possible that the inscriptions were added and the family group adapted for placement in a family tomb, enabling the statue group to reflect changes in the younger Meh-er-nefer’s status and family situation.