Majestic Horus God General — Print & Oil Painting

He is walking away from us, and that single decision governs the picture. The falcon head is turned in profile so you get the hooked beak and the ridge of black feathers, but the body is seen from behind, cloak dragging, so the figure is already leaving the frame it stands in.

Black on black is the technical problem the artist has set, and it is solved with edges. A cold blue rim runs down the beak and over the crown of the head, another catches the top of the feathered mantle, a third picks out the studded belt and the hanging strips of the pleated apron. Between those lines the armour is simply dark.

Beyond him the space opens into a gate. A colossal carved figure stands in the light on the right, banners and standards lean at intervals, and a crowd is suggested in low red strokes that never resolve into individuals. It reads as an entrance rather than a battlefield.

Horus is the falcon god of kingship and of the sky, the god with whom living pharaohs identified themselves, so a military rank sits naturally on him even though the black plate and the cloak are pure invention. Nothing in the costume is copied from a tomb wall. The head does all the identifying.

It belongs to our Egypt collection. Its opposite in every respect is the archer in blue linen, painted in full desert daylight with the mask openly a mask.