Ptolemaic Period, 332-30 BC. A carved black granite head of a male with realistic features, the oblong face showing several signs of age related to the conventional Ptolemaic representation of an ageing face: the forehead deeply marked by a set of horizontal wrinkles and side of the mouth with deep grooves; the unusually large almond-shaped eyes executed asymmetrically, with the left eye smaller than the right; the short-cropped hair arranged in curls and adorned with a diadem; the reverse showing traces of an undecorated pillar; mounted on a custom-made display stand. See Bianchi, R.S., The Striding Draped Male Figure of Ptolemaic Egypt, 1978, in Herwig Maehler and Volker Michael Strocka (ed.), Das ptolemäische Ägypten. Akten des internationalen Symposions 27. - 29. September 1976 in Berlin, Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern; Bothmer, B.V., The Signs of Age, Bull. Mus. Fine Arts, Boston, 1951, 49, 277; Bothmer, B.V., Egyptian Antecedents of Roman Republican Verism, 1988, Quad. Ric. Scient., 116; Bothmer, B.V. et al., Egyptian Sculpture of the Late Period 700 B.C. to A.D. 100, Brooklyn: The Brooklyn Museum, 1960; Walker, S. & Higgs, P., Cleopatra of Egypt, from History to the Myth, London, 2001, p.112, fig.138, pp.180-183, figs.189-190, 226, no.207, for similar sculptures; see Bothmer, 1951, 69-74; Bothmer, 1988, 47-65, for discussion of signs of the ageing face. 2.7 kg total, 21cm including stand (8 1/4"). From the private collection of a New York collector; part of his family collection since at least the early 1970s; inked collection number '93' to the reverse; thence by descent from his grandfather in 1975; accompanied by a scholarly note by Dr Alberto Maria Pollastrini. Dr Alberto Maria Pollastrini writes: 'The head was originally part of a standing statue, probably a 'striding draped male figure', a typology well attested in the corpus of Ptolemaic artistic production (Bianchi 1978, 95-102"). According to the strong similarities with the dark grey schist portrait head preserved in the Walter Art Gallery of Baltimore, Md.; no. 22.9 (W.A.G. no. 230) (Bothmer et alii 1960,153-154, pl. CIX, figs. 293-294), I can suggest a dating of the head under consideration in the 2nd century BCE.' [No Reserve]