COLNAGHI

Colnaghi London - Out of the Sand: Ancient Egypt Rediscovered

Opening on 7 September and continuing until 17 November 2026, Out of the Sand: Ancient Egypt Rediscovered brings together antiquities, paintings, works on paper, early photographs and rare books to examine the long history through which ancient Egypt has been studied, collected and represented.

Egypt was never lost to the Egyptians, but its monuments and material culture were repeatedly presented to audiences elsewhere as discoveries. Roman artists absorbed Egyptian forms into the visual and religious life of the Empire, while European scholars, artists and travellers later approached the country through the intellectual and political concerns of their own periods. The Egypt that entered books, paintings, photographs and museums was therefore shaped as much by the circumstances of its reception as by the ancient civilisation from which it derived.

The exhibition begins with objects made for use within Egyptian society, many of which were intended for funerary contexts in which the preservation of the body, name and identity of the deceased was understood to secure continued existence after death. Their subsequent removal from tombs and temples placed them within very different systems of meaning, first as objects of excavation and private collecting, and eventually as subjects of scholarly classification and museum display.

Napoleon’s campaign of 1798 represents an important moment in this history. Although the military expedition ended in failure, the scholars, engineers and artists who accompanied it undertook a survey of Egypt on an unprecedented scale, later published in the monumental Description de l’Égypte. During the nineteenth century, archaeological publications, Orientalist painting and photography carried the monuments of the Nile to an increasingly wide European audience. The architectural views of David Roberts and the early photographs of Maxime Du Camp belong to this expanding visual record, although neither medium offered a neutral account of what it claimed to document.

Out of the Sand places ancient objects beside the works through which later generations attempted to record and understand them, considering the history of Egyptology alongside the history of representation. In doing so, the exhibition examines how the surviving material evidence of ancient Egypt acquired new meanings as it passed through excavation, scholarship, collecting and display.

The exhibition forms part of the wider programme of Colnaghi’s Oriental Art Department.

Sculptor’s Trial Piece Fragment, Egyptian Late Dynastic Period, neo-Memphite, 30th Dynasty, c. 380–343 BC, limestone, 8.1 × 13.4 cm.