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Egyptian Revival

 

On a visit today I was taken by an Egyptian revival style piano.




I have amongst my books a Taschen Description de l’Egypt. Being Taschen it is of course just the illustrations rather than the full contents including original nine volumes of text. See Description de l'Égypte - Wikipedia. Still a delight albeit at reduced size. It was of course the eventual output of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, accompanied by his savants, to explore, map and transform Egypt with French enlightenment.

 



Today I was at the Waiheke Musical Museum on Waiheke Island, the museum sometimes known after its founders as the Whittaker Museum. A great living history show by the now proprietors talking and playing on the many historic keyboard instruments there. One particularly took my fancy – an Egyptian Revival piano, pictured above. Here is their page on the instrument: Upright Piano – Egyptian - Waiheke Musical Museum.

The performer on the piano said it was a rather ordinary instrument musically. It had been restored recently by a craftsman on the island.

You can see more of the collection here: The Instruments - Waiheke Musical Museum

It’s from the second period of Egyptian revival in the later 19th century. This is a neat essay about the revival styes from The Met: Egyptian Revival | Essay | The Metropolitan Museum of Art | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (metmuseum.org)

The Taschen volume in its 1000 odd pages has many illustrations of columns like those of the piano. See the cover above and this:





I did not spot the exact original for the piano – but the Description was a source of Egyptian revival design elements for many years.

A nice surprise to see a derived output of Napoleon’s savants being treasured.

 

Look back to 2008 in this blog. I have visited the subject before.

 

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