Spearing Fish (c. 667–647 BCE): Art, History and Details

Spearing Fish (c. 667–647 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The spearing of fish against a conventionalized background of water--a classic subject of the painted reliefs found in tombs of the Pyramid Age. The papyrus thicket shown in the background is represented growing in perfect symmetry quite unlike the tangled riot of vegetation typical of the growing plant. Probably an exact copy of a detail of Dynasty V at Saqqara. It is likely that this relief comes from the same composition as 1949.498.

Object facts

• Title: Spearing Fish
• Date: c. 667–647 BCE
• Culture: Egypt, Late period (715–332 BCE), Dynasties 25–26
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: limestone
• Dimensions: Overall: 26.4 x 25.8 cm (10 3/8 x 10 3/16 in.)
• Collection: Egypt - Late Period
• Department: Egyptian and Ancient Near Eastern Art
• Accession number: 1949.499

Collection credit

Gift of the Hanna Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Cleveland Museum of Art, “Recent Acquisition Press Release,” January 1952, Cleveland Museum of Art Archives.
• Wunderlich, Silvia. "A Group of Egyptian Reliefs of the Saïte Period." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 39, no. 3 (March 1952): 44-47, 49-50.
• Cleveland Museum of Art, and Martha L. Carter. Egyptian Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, Ohio: The Museum, 1963.

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.