Nina M. Davies

British artist and copyist. She was born in Salonika, 6 January 1881, daughter of Cecil J. Cummings and Sarah Tannoch, and trained at the Slade School of Art and the Royal College of Art under Walter Crane (1845–1915).

Her interest in Egypt was aroused when she visited Alexandria in 1906. The following year she married Norman de G. Davies (1865–1941), with whom she was to record a great many Theban tombs. An excellent artist, she went to great pains to reproduce colours as exactly as possible, and achieved remarkable results in the days before colour photography; she used egg tempera when making copies of scenes instead of merely watercolours. In all, she worked at Thebes for over thirty years, 1908–1939; three of the five volumes of The Theban Tombs Series were entirely her work, the others had drawings by her husband as well, while Sir Alan H. Gardiner (1879–1963) edited the series. She also copied at Amarna, 1925–1926, and at Beni Hasan, 1931–1932.

In 1923 Gardiner exhibited a collection of her copies at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and this was followed by the publication of two folio volumes of Ancient Egyptian Paintings, 1936; in 1954 a miniature Penguin edition of some of these was illustrated with small reproductions and had a text by the artist. In 1958 she published a series of paintings from originals in the British Museum and the Bankes Collection. She, with her husband, also helped Gardiner in selecting and making drawings of good representative hieroglyphs of the XVIIIth Dynasty to use in Gardiner's hieroglyphic font. She published Picture Writing in Ancient Egypt, 1958, and contributed a number of articles to the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology.

She left two of her copies to the Egyptian Department of the British Museum, and other copies together with a shabti figure to the Ashmolean Museum. Her Egyptological books were bequeathed to the Griffith Institute and to the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford. She died in Hinksey Hill, near Oxford, 21 April 1965.