THE FAYUM PORTRAITS AND THE DOXIADIS CLAN

afford the fees that embalmers charged,
added a final touch: the painted portrait
of the defund, a facial representation for
the mummy's future life.
"Now", says Dorothy Thompson,
"almost two milleniums later, a present
day Greek artist versed in the tradition
of Byzantine icon-painting has come to
gaze at the portraits. Thus the book took
life...."
Let us hear what the author has to
say about the Fayum portraits.
"Suddenly in the late 1880's scores of
beautiful and mysterious portraits began
to reach a Western Europe and the
United States. They came from Egypt,
12
from a region called Fayoum, a short
distance from Cairo. A few of these portraits
were discovered earlier and others
came to light since at sites outside
Fayum as well, making a total of more
then one thousand to date. Fayum is the
name that has persisted over all others
in archeology and art history describing
them because more have been found
there than anywhere else.
"The Fayum portraits is the most outstanding
body of paintings to have come
to us from the ancient world, remarkable
for their social and psychological
insight and for their quality of art. Andre
Malraux described them as glowing
with a flame of immortal life. Products
of the Greek naturalistic tradition, the
best of them painted directly from life,
they have by some miracle of painting
captured life itself..."
"Yet", continues Euphrosyne, "those
portraits have constantly been neglect-
ed by historians and critics and are practically
unknown to the general public..."
Asked what she thought was the reason
for this misconception, Euphrisyne says
she can think of three reasons:
First -- those portraits are not signed
by any known artist. Even the same Fay-
oum has been objected as not all portraits
were discovered in the Fayum region.
They are what is called "victims of
aninymity."
Secondly-- they are scattered all over
the world, sometimes in different sec-
tions of the same museum: as Greek
portraits of Egyptian mummies which
date from the Greco-Roman period,
they are often found in the Egyptian,
Greco-Roman and Coptic department.
And, Thirdly -- they were initially
dogged by the reputation that they
might be fakes as they had been so overrestored
by their collectors that all
seemed possible.
The author of this book is a painter
in her own right. Born in Athens, she
was lucky enough to have had as her first
teacher, rather her mentor in art, the
famous Yannis Tsarouchis. There is no
doubt that her interest in the Fayum
portraits was kindled by him as he himself
had been greatly influenced by the
Egyptian portraits. Her studies later in
Europe and the U.S.A (Oscar Kokoscha
School of Painting in Austria, The Slade
School of Fine Arts in London, the
Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan
and lately the Wimbledon School
of Art in London), all but developed her
desire to look deeper into what she calls
the first surviving portraiture in history.
Euphrosyne's Doxiadis comes from
a well-known and very respected family
in Greece. Her grand father, Dr. Apostolos
Doxiadis, a pediatrician, was born
in what used to be called Anatoliki
Roumelia, the Greek speaking province
of Bulgaria. The family was well off and
the two sons were sent to Germany to
study medicine. (Actually the grand fa-
GREEK-AMERICAN REVIEW