Chair or Bed Leg with the God Bes (1540–1296 BCE): Art, History and Details

Chair or Bed Leg with the God Bes (1540–1296 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The genial god Bes appears here in the form of a furniture leg. With hands on his pot belly and wearing a short kilt with a long apron, he stands bowlegged on a truncated cone base. He has long, upward sweeping, diagonal eyebrows, large eyes, full cheeks, and rounded ears, and he wears a full beard and mustache. His body is soft and unmuscular. As a household god, Bes figured prominently as a decorative motif both in royal and private dwellings.

Object facts

• Title: Chair or Bed Leg with the God Bes
• Date: 1540–1296 BCE
• Culture: Egypt, New Kingdom (1540–1069 BCE), Dynasty 18
• Type: Furniture and woodwork
• Technique: tamarisk
• Dimensions: Overall: 44.7 x 5.9 cm (17 5/8 x 2 5/16 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - New Kingdom
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1982.42

Collection credit

Guerdon S. Holden Memorial Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• “Annual Report for 1982.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 70, no. 6 (June 1983): 223–270.
• Berman, Lawrence M., and Kenneth J. Bohač. Catalogue of Egyptian Art: The Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1999

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.