Oil on canvas, signed and dated 1893 mid right
Image size 9½ x 8 inches
Gilt frame
Leonard E Lawrance exhibited one picture at Suffolk Street in 1880, and three elsewhere. He was based in London.
This beautiful painting depicts a young girl in deep thought while the two Ibis eat from the bowl. Behind her the wall is decorated with hieroglyphs.
The African sacred ibis was an object of religious veneration in ancient Egypt, particularly associated with the deity Djehuty. He is responsible for writing, mathematics, measurement and time as well as the moon and magic. In artworks of the Late Period of Ancient Egypt, the Ibis is popularly depicted as an ibis-headed man in the act of writing. However, Mitogenomic diversity in sacred ibis mummies indicate that ancient Egyptians captured the birds from the wild rather than farming them.
At the town of Hermopolis, ibises were reared specifically for sacrificial purposes and in the serapeum at Saqqara, archaeologists found the mummies of one and a half million ibises and hundreds of thousands of falcons.