Mahmoud Sa'id

Biography

In 1912 a fifteen-year-old from Alexandria began taking lessons from the Italian painter Amelia Casonato Da Forno. Four years later his teacher was Arturo Zanieri. The son of a former prime minister of Egypt, he took up painting from the start alongside another, more respectable path.

Mahmoud Sa'id was born on 8 April 1897 in Alexandria. His father, Muhammad Sa'id Pasha, was of Turkish origin and had been prime minister; the family belonged to the wealthy, long-established Alexandrian elite. Queen Farida was his niece, and in her recollections she described him as a quiet, gentle, painfully shy man.

In 1919, the year of the first Egyptian revolution, he took his law degree on the French programme. His father allowed him to go to Paris to continue his legal studies, and Sa'id used the opportunity to take up painting: first for about a year in the open section of the Grande Chaumière, then at the Académie Julian. Between 1919 and 1921 he travelled through Europe, went round the Paris museums and exhibitions, and read about the history of art in Italy, France and Britain. Back in Egypt, he entered the public prosecution service, was posted to Mansoura, to the Mixed Courts (the courts that heard cases involving foreigners), then moved up the judicial ladder and reached the rank of counsellor. At fifty, around 1947, he retired. Painting did not stop: from 1919 until his death he painted a great deal in oil. In Alexandria he often shared a studio with a friend, the Greek painter Aristomenis Angelopoulos.

His manner was formed from several influences: Pharaonic painting, the classical rules of the European Renaissance, and a lawyer’s habit of order. From the mid-1920s to the end of the 1930s he painted scenes of Egyptian life; “The Shadufs” (1934) and “The Dervishes” (1935) belong to this period. In the 1940s portraiture became his main genre, one in which he cared about psychological depth as well as likeness. In the 1950s his pictures grew quieter and cooler: broad landscapes, even light, an absence of sharp emotion. I think this development is best checked against the canvases themselves: the descriptions are rather general.

In 1937 he held two solo exhibitions in New York and took part in the International Exposition in Paris, where he received a gold medal for work done for the Egyptian pavilion. At the Venice Biennale he was shown in 1938 and 1948; by some accounts also in 1950 and 1952. In 1953 he took part in the UNESCO exhibition of Arab artists in Beirut and in an exhibition of Egyptian art in Khartoum, and in 1958 in an Egyptian exhibition in Moscow. Among his works are also named “The Opening of the Suez Canal”, “The Liquorice Drink Seller”, “Girl of the People”, “The Beggar” and an early portrait of Queen Farida.

France made him a member of the Legion of Honour in 1951.

In 1960 he became the first Egyptian painter to receive the State Prize for Merit in the Arts, presented by President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the same year 120 of his paintings were shown at the Museum of Fine Arts in Alexandria.

Mahmoud Sa’id died on 8 April 1964, on his birthday. Soon after his death a large exhibition of 137 works was held in the same museum. The Mahmoud Said Museum occupies the family villa in the Gianaclis district of Alexandria; his paintings are also held at the Gezira Center for Modern Art in Cairo, at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, at the Arab World Institute in Paris and at the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah.