Sekhmet The Fearless Goddess of War — Print & Oil Painting

The crown arrives before the face does. A great gold disc, cracked like old lacquer, stands above the dust with a cobra rearing at its front, and only as the eye travels down does the lioness head resolve underneath, muzzle blunt, whiskers catching what light there is.

That combination is not decoration. A lioness head carrying a sun disc with a uraeus at the brow is precisely how Egyptian craftsmen identified Sekhmet, and the hundreds of granite statues of her that survive all carry it. She was the burning aspect of the sun, the Eye of Ra sent against humanity, and Egyptians said the hot desert wind was her breath.

The artist has taken that last idea literally. She is less painted than excavated from a dust storm: the shoulder and one forelimb emerge on the left, the rest of the body stays inside the haze, and the whole canvas is worked in ochre, bronze and dull rose with no cool colour anywhere.

Two human figures on the rocks at the right supply the scale, one leaping with a blade above his head, one braced on a ledge drawing a bow. They are perhaps a fortieth of her height and painted in three strokes each, and their smallness is the entire point of the composition.

Part of our Egypt collection, alongside the jackal god standing over a single traveller, which uses the same contrast of a god against a human speck in a very different key.