Nina M. Davies (1881–1965)

Nina M. Davies was born Anna Macpherson Cummings in Salonika, Greece, to a Scottish family. After her father, an agent for a shipping company, died when she was 13, the family returned to the UK, settling in Bedford, where she and her sisters attended a large private school. The family then moved to London so that Nina could attend the Slade School of Art and the Royal College of Art. In 1906, she visited some friends in Alexandria, Egypt, where she developed an interest in Egypt and its monuments. She also met and married Norman de Garis Davies, an archeological surveyer and head of the graphic section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s expedition to Egypt. She began painting and assisting her husband in the Theban tombs in which he was working. From 1913-1914, she was employed by the museum to make color facsimiles of tomb paintings. She and her husband collaborated with Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner on publications such as The Tomb of Amenemhet (1915) and The Tomb of Huy, Viceroy of Nubia (1926). They also worked together on the five-volume Theban Tomb Series in the 1920. She later contributed color plates for the Mond Excavations at Thebes publication of the tomb of Ramose. In 1926-1927, she and her husband helped with the Egypt Exploration Society expedition at Amarna. This work resulted in the publication of The Mural Painting of el-‘Amarna. In 1931–1932 they took two months away from Thebes to work at Beni Hasan, where Nina copied some of the major scenes. Her work, published in a lavishly produced book called Ancient Egyptian Paintings, is considered among her finest achievements. The first public exhibition of her work took place at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1923, and subsequently in Brussels and Oxford, before the paintings were presented to the British Museum and the Ashmolean Museum. The Metropolitan Museum mounted a display of some of Nina's facsimiles in 1930. She also painted examples of hieroglyphs, published in Picture Writing in Ancient Egypt (1958). The couple left Egypt and returned to England in 1939, and Norman Davies died in 1941. Nina did volunteer work during World War II and edited her husband's book The Temple of Hibis in Kharga (1953). In the early 1950s, she visited Egypt again to complete the painting of a box of Tutankhamun, published in 1962. During the 1950s, four books of her paintings were published, and some were translated into other languages. Scenes from Some Theban Tombs (1963), contained material that had been awaiting publication since the 1920s. She continued to work into her 80s.