After more than 100 years of separation, the Royal Ontario Museum is reuniting two extraordinarily well-preserved Fayum mummy portraits. These two paintings were origionally acquired by the ROM in 1912 from Sotheby’s by Charles T. Currelly, one of the ROM’s founders. Currelly retained one of the paintings for the ROM, while the other went on to the National Gallery of Canada. The paintings finally are on long-term display at the ROM starting Saturday, May 18, 2019, in the Museum’s Eaton Gallery of Rome, in celebration of International Museum Day. This type of portraiture has a facinating history. They were unknown until 1887, when farmers discovered many of them at er-Rubayat, in the Fayum region. Theodor von Graf, a Viennese antiquarian, bought the paintings and exhibited them to the public through a series of exhibitions in Berlin, Munich, Paris, Brussels, London, and New York. In 1888, Sir Flinders Petrie, a British
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