Winifred Brunton Wikiquette good faith be nice Winifred s painting technique for the pharaonic portraits I turned to the statutes and reliefs These would show me how the sitters impressed the artists of those days and the work of an artist s chisel or brush is at least as good evidence as the sworn word of a witness in a court of law at any rate when the artist is as literal minded as were the Egyptians Do we not know the honest mistakes a man in the witness box can make And shall we not concede the difference between a trained and an untrained observer The ancient artist was a trained observer I would examine his trained evidence on what he saw and compare it with what I could see today of the Pharaohs This done discrepancies appeared which could not be disregarded And besides the various artists who portrayed a Pharaoh did not all agree in detail among themselves This added to the difficulty It was evident that some detailed and perhaps laborious comparing would have to be done I had recourse again to the mummy and took the face carefully back through the process of mummification Certain confirmations appeared of the artists evidence these I accepted and retained especially as they seemed to me to agree with the king s known character Discrepancies on the other hand could be partly accounted for by the changes in the subject between youth and old age and partly by the deference due to kings Finally I did construct a firm scaffolding on which to build my portrait and so the picture of Sety I was begun The costume was a simpler problem One had only to consult the monuments and the jewel room of the Museum and to be careful to avoid howlers such as a dinner party parure with a field service helmet and so on Ramses II was next attempted and I was greatly cheered by the recognition of my resuscitated kings by several eminent archaeologists Not all the Egyptologists who recognised my portraits realised the method in my madness the slow sifting of evidence and the laborious brick making To many they seemed flights of a fancy only slightly if at all controlled by research But one of the most famous of them all namely Professor Breasted gave me enormous encouragement Whatever was to be thought of these particular portraits he admitted that this was a line of research not hitherto tried but perfectly legitimate and which might conceivably yield valuable results His kind words so stimulated me that I made similar attempts with other defunct royalties and gradually completed the series of kings and queens which appear in these pages