Footnotes

Provenance:
Property of a gentleman.
With William Oldman (24 August 1879 – 30 June 1949), London, acquired 1910-14. Accompanied by a copy of a photo of William Oldman with the mask, taken in 77 Brixton Road, London, where he lived until 1928.
Jessica LeFroy, 1875 - circa 1914.
Collection of Lady Jane Franklin (04 December 1791 – 18 July 1875) the Tasmanian traveller and wife of polar explorer Sir John Franklin.

It is thought that Lady Franklin acquired the mask in Egypt in 1834 when she went down the Nile with the Rev. Johan Rudolf Theophilus Leider. Leider was a German missionary who worked for the British Church Missionary Society (CMS) in Cairo from 1825-62. He was fluent in Arabic and a keen Egyptologist and collector. They travelled together from February to May 1834 and, on their return to Cairo, she remained at Leider's house for some time, despite her husband's protestations that she should return home.

Lady Franklin met Leider on 2 February 1834 in Cairo and, after a turbulent start with her initial travel companions, the Thurburn family and Captain and Mrs. Scott, she and Leider hired two boats on 5 February and decided to travel to Upper Egypt and Nubia together. Although many pages from her time travelling with Leider have been removed from her diary, they seem to have become very close over this journey. On 24 February, after receiving a bouquet of flowers from Leider with the thorns removed, she writes, 'would that he could even with bloody finger pull off all the thorns in my path throughout life.'

It was through Leider that Lady Franklin met Yanni (Mr Ioannes Athanasiou, who was also known as Giovanni d'Athanasi) at Luxor on 22 April 1834. He had been the antiquities agent for Henry Salt, the British Consul in Egypt from 1817-1827, and it is possible that she could have purchased the mask from him. She does not mention the mask directly but there are references to acquiring a stone sculpture in return for three bottles of wine from Mr Athanasiou and various other acquisitions made throughout her journey.

Jessica LeFroy was the grandniece of Lady Jane Franklin and she eventually inherited the mask. Between 1911 and 1912 Miss LeFroy sold several Hawaiian items to Mr Oldman and she may have sold the Egyptian mask to Mr Oldman at this time. Although there is no acquisition date for the mask on Mr Oldman's inventory, he notes that it was acquired in Egypt, and it is likely that Lady Jane Franklin therefore acquired it on her Egyptian travels.

The fact that the eyes are separately made and inlaid into the wood indicates that the deceased was a person of fairly high status. In the 1830s when Lady Franklin visited Egypt, the main sites of excavation were Saqqara, Abydos and Thebes, so it is likely that the mask comes from one of these places.

For more information on Lady Jane Franklin's journal see W. Franklin Rawnsley (ed.), The Life, Diaries and Correspondence of Lady Jane Franklin, London, 1923. The catalogue reference for the original journal, now held in the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, is MS 248/154; BJ Franklin Jane Journal.