This sculpture of a seated woman and a young girl standing beside her is unusual as it was uncommon for Romans to create sitting portraits of women, a style which was much more accustomed among Ancient Greeks. The way in which the woman's draped left arm is bent across her breast was, however, a popular stance for female portrait figures of this time.
The mother is wearing a chiton, which covers the whole body, and only the hands and the neck are exposed. The young daughter has her legs crossed and is leaning towards her mother. The style of the daughter's hair was characteristic of young girls in Classical Greece and aristocratic Roman women, and the stylised arrangement of the mother's hair helps us to determine the date of this work.
This sculpture was found in 1720 in Apt, in the Lubéron region of France and was acquired by the 6th Duke of Devonshire at the Wanstead House Sale in 1822. It has recently been part of a 3D scanning project by The Conservation Technologies department of National Museums Liverpool. They were on-site for a total of five days using two close-range laser scanners to record the surfaces of the statues in 3D at high resolution. Over 100 million data points were collected, each point being a precise measurement of the surface.
