There were Giants in those days

Brunton employed transparent watercolour to suggest the warmth of desert light and the texture of weathered stone. Subtle gradations of tone create depth, while soft shadows elongate across the ground, enhancing spatial recession. Fine brushwork defines the folds of clothing and the grain of limestone, grounding the scene in observed detail rather than idealized form.

Executed during Brunton’s travels in Egypt, the watercolour remained in private hands until its 1974 auction at Bonhams. It had been previously exhibited at the Hanover Gallery in London, though the exact date is unrecorded. No public record indicates further exhibitions or institutional ownership after the sale, suggesting its continued presence in private collections.

Brunton’s work emerged during a period of heightened European interest in Egyptian antiquities, though her approach avoided exoticism. Unlike many contemporaries who depicted ruins as dramatic spectacles, she focused on quiet, everyday presence within them—aligning with a growing trend of intimate, ethnographic observation in early 20th-century travel art.

The watercolour stands as a quiet example of early 20th-century female artists engaging with archaeological sites through direct observation. While not widely reproduced or studied, it contributes to a lesser-known body of work that documents Egypt’s monuments not as monuments alone, but as lived-in spaces, shaped by time and human continuity.