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

ZOLTÁN HORVÁTH: A unique servant statue in the Egyptian Collection

For want of an accession register, it is rather difficult to assess today when and from where a particular object entered the collection.

35 Occasionally ad hoc references to giving or purchasing antiquities may come up in Freud's papers or his correspondence;

36 all these sources, however, seem to disregard the scribe statuettes. Nevertheless, the case is probably not as hopeless as it may seem. I have already argued above that the statues should be related on stylistic grounds to a group of wooden figurines

— seemingly also forgeries

—arranged neatly on top of a cabinet in Freud's study and the shelf directly above it.

37 Lustig related in an interview that he had bought several wooden artefacts from the collection of an Egyptian "pasha" who had settled in Vienna and sold them to Freud in 1931 or 1932.

38 The lot included a large boat (undoubtedly identical with the large whitewashed funerary boat in the cabinet with curious goosehead shaped prow and stern, and with sailors and a mummiform figure under a canopy on shipboard), a group of servant figurines and a falcon-headed deity; the latter has been pronounced by Nicholas Reeves to be of modern manufacture.

39 The fact that under examination, pieces from the collection of the "pasha" were proved to be forgeries, is neither surprising, nor exceptional, since locally produced fakes are known to have become common in Egypt during the mid-nineteenth century, and these easily found their way into the European market.

40 It may be assumed then that the wooden statuettes in the "pasha's" lot should be, in fact, recognised as the group of forged figurines that includes the three scribe statuettes, currently in the Freud Museum, London and the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, respectively. It is even more difficult to give an account of what happened to the piece during the troublesome years before it was offered to our collection in 1943. The photographs that had been taken before Freud moved to London in 1938 show only two scribe statuettes on his shelf, so it can be taken for granted that the statuette left the collection at an earlier date. Yet, the archives of the Museum of Fine Arts do not provide an answer to when and why this particular statue was taken from Vienna. When the piece entered our collection, Zoltán Antal, the Hungarian antiquities dealer, informed the Museum that the statuette had been formerly in the Viennese collection of Sigmund Freud. Unfortunately, no further details were recorded and since, Antal, who seems to have done business repeatedly with the Museum in those years, has disappeared from sight; today it is almost impossible to follow the statue's way from Vienna to Budapest.

41 Approaching the problem from Freud's point of view, it is highly unlikely that he deliberately sold the object;

42 rather, he may have given it to a