Painting Egypt in Colour: Bridget Riley’s Egyptian Palette (opens in new tab)

For British artists over countless years, Egypt has been a rich source of inspiration. Famously, Agatha Christie’s visit to Upper Egypt shaped her novel, Death on the Nile (1937). Virginia Woolf was engaged with Egypt’s ancient civilisations, with references to the country littered across her essays and diaries, as with her references to Cleopatra in her 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own. Earlier, in 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote of Egypt as an “antique land” in the poem Ozymandias, familiar...