Anubis the Guardian — Print & Oil Painting

Look at the bottom right corner first. A human figure stands there in the blowing dust, arms slightly out for balance, and he comes up to roughly the knee of the god in front of him. Everything the painting wants to say about power is in that ratio.

He is worked in cool grey-violet against a storm the colour of rust. Jackal head with the ears alert and the eye a hard red point, a striped headcloth, a broad collar banded in gold and turquoise, an ankh on a cord at the sternum, a kilt of gold and green stripes. One hand is raised and open at chest height; the other rests on a long shaft ending in a heavy gold blade planted in the sand.

That weapon belongs to the artist, not to Egypt. Anubis is the god of embalming and of the passage after death, the one who leads the dead into the Hall of the Two Truths and weighs the heart against the feather of Maat, and the images that survive give him a sceptre and an ankh rather than an axe. The ankh at his chest is the accurate part.

The staging is all weather. Birds wheel through the upper third, a pyramid dissolves at the lower right, a dune closes the left edge like a wall. Warm ochre light comes from behind the head, throwing the muzzle into partial silhouette and leaving that red eye as the sharpest thing in the frame.

From our Egypt collection. Compare it with the jackal warriors at a run for the same head in violent motion, and with the hooded procession for a version drained of every warm colour.