Etruskisk sarkofag i Louvre

About this work

Marie Henriques found the subject mat- ter for these watercolours on two trips abroad. From the Louvre in Paris, we see an archaic, Etruscan terracotta sarcophagus dated 520–510 BCE, and from a visit to the collection of antiquities in Berlin she has depicted an archaic, Greek marble kore dated 570 BCE, now in the Pergamonmuseum. Henriques’s fascination with depicting sculpture was awakened on a trip to Stockholm in 1909, where she studied the sculpture of Saint George and the Dragon in the city’s cathedral, Storkyrkan. Concurrently with this, she had come across depictions of polychrome archaic Greek sculptures that caught her interest. These finds had been excavated on the Acropolis during the 1880s, and in 1910 Henriques set out for her first visit to Greece together with the archaeologist Frederik Poulsen. The special feature of these sculptures was the clear remains of colour still visible on them, a trait which caused a stir among contemporary archaeologists. Most excavated sculptures had emerged the colour of limestone or marble, and the white sculpture had long been seen as the ideal. The remnants of colour on the polychrome pieces meant that no casts could be made…