Czére Andrea szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 102-103. (Budapest, 2005)

ZOLTÁN HORVÁTH: A unique servant statue in the Egyptian Collection

10 DRAWING FROM A LIMFSTONE FRAGMENT OF A RELIEF SHOWING A SCRIBE OF THE BOARD" AT WORK. PARIS. LOUVRE. INV. NO. 14.321 artefacts that he could purchase at a reasonable price. He was conscious of the abundance of forgeries on the market, and whenever it was possible, he consulted antiquities experts beforehand, like his long-standing friend Emanuel Löwy, or the acknowledged archaeologist and art dealer in Rome, Ludwig Pollak. To avoid buying fakes, Freud regularly had most of the Egyptian artefacts authenticated in the Kunsthistorisches Museum by Hans Demel, Director of the Egyptian and Oriental Collection in the 1920s and 1930s,'

1 and carefully kept the authentication notes in his desk and bookcase. These documents, however, refer only to a part of Freud's collection, and some of them, interestingly but hardly to our surprise, were prepared for objects which are now believed to be forgeries.

33 According to the dealer Robert Lustig, who sold hundreds of objects to the scholar between 1928 and 1938, if an artefact ever turned out to be a fake, Freud instantly gave it away.

34 Apparently no authentication slip has been issued for the three scribe statuettes concerned in this article, and the fact that two of them are still deposed in London suggests that neither Freud nor his consultants recognised their suspicious nature.