Mummies in Rhode Island (1)

Providence (1)

The Rhode Island School of Design Museum
Rhode Island School of Design
244 Benefit Street
Providence, RI 02903-2723
401-454-6500
​Nes-min on the RISD site

Mummy and Coffin of Nes-Min
Second Prophet of Min and Khonsu
Father, Second Prophet of Min
Mother, Sistrum player

Ptolemaic Period ca. 250 B.C.
Coffin: Wood, stucco, polychrome
mummy: Linen, cartonnage, human remains
His cartonnage mask is in the British Museum.

Certainly from Akhmim
Provenance:  Museum Appropriation and Mary B. Jackson Fund 38.206.2.  Lady Meux, Theobald's Park; William Randolph Hearst.
The trustees of the British Museum declined the bequest of Lady Meux's Egyptian collection,  £2,250.  It was then sold at public auction, where Hearst acquired the Mummy and Coffin of Nes-Min, and the pair statue of Nebsen and Nebet-ta, now in the Brooklyn Musuem.

Publication:
Banks, Miriam A. "The Mummy of Nes-min; The Coffin of Nes-min." Bulletin of the Rhode Island School of Design 27, no.1 (1939); 21-35
Winkes/RISD, 1974 p.8
The coffin of Nes-Min contains 16 registers of text which list his titles and geneaology. His coffin design indicates that he lived at Akhmim in Middle-Egypt during the Ptolemaic period.

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Links:

• our risd: Unsettling History
• ​Return of the Mummy: Nesmin arrives new digs at RISD Museum
• ​Reinvention at the RISD

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Harmony in Pink and Grey (Portrait of Lady Meux), 1881, Frick Collection

Nes-Amsu

Lady Valerie Susan Meux (pronounced like "muse") (1847-1910)  was a well known Victorian socialite. Her husband,  Sir Henry Meux, 3rd Baronet and wealthy heir of Meux and Co. Brewery in London, met her when she was just plain Valerie Langdon, playing a banjo and serving up drinks in Brighton. She married the Baronet in secret when she was 31, but was never accepted by his family or polite society.  Her life is the stuff of anecdotes.   To list but a few examples:  she would often drive herself around London in a high phaeton drawn by a pair of zebras.  She owned race horses under the assumed name of Mr. Theobalds, and her horse Ardeshir won the Sussex Stakes in 1897, and when Whistler, bankrupted by the Ruskin Trial, was in desperate need of a commission, it was a series of her portraits that put him back to work;  one is in the Frick, another in the Honolulu Museum of Art,  and the third, "Portrait of Lady Meux in furs," was destroyed by Whistler himself over some chance comment made during the sitting.  However it was her interest in collecting Egyptian artifacts, sparked by her many trips to The British Museum, that brings her to this page.  In the end she collected well over 1,700 of her own ancient Egyptian objects, many of which were published in several volumes by Egyptologist, E.A. Wallis Budge. The volume describing Nes-Min is,  Some Account of the Collection of Egyptian Antiquities in the possession of Lady Meux.

We can not quit Lady Meux without one last anecdote.  Nes-Amsu, as Nes-Min was called back in those Budge-days had been acquired in Egypt by Walter Herbert Ingram for £50 from the English Consul at Luxor.  Ingram had him shipped home from Cairo, and then gifted Nes-Min to Lady Meux in 1886.  A year later when Ingram was elephant-shooting in Somaliland, he was knocked off his horse, and trampled to death by the elephant he was trying to shoot.  This became on of the very first "curse of the mummy stories" and was published in an 1896 issue of The Strand magazine.