Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, Cairo

Bonhams is delighted to present to the market for the very first time Shaaban Zaki; one of Egypt's forgotten artistic pioneers of the 20th century. The self-taught artist Shaaban Zaki was born in Mansoura in 1899 and passed away in Cairo in 1962. Zaki came from a lower middle-class family who were mostly government employees. Zaki began his career as a railway station employee. Despite having no formal academic education, Farag did however take a fine art course in correspondence with the Art Institute of Chicago and from then onwards he fully immersed himself in the emerging art and culture scene in Egypt.

Zaki joined the first generation's art revival movement of the 1920's. He had his first major show at le Salon du Caire where he was able to display his artistic talents and continued exhibiting there all the way until 1958. He also showcased his artworks at the Hedayat Exhibition of 1926 and went on to exhibiting his works in the Museum of Modern Art, in Cairo whilst Ragheb Ayad was the director.

He was a close friend to the elites of his time like Saad El Khadem, the poet Hafez Ibrahim and Abbas El Ahmad. He wrote articles on visual arts, the new generation of artists and the thriving Egyptian art scene in the very influential journal Apollo, the journal was also unique in that it reached out to writers beyond Egypt's borders and was devoted to the Arab world. Zaki also began publishing articles in Al-Hilal magazine, one of the oldest and most prestigious Arab magazine dealing with the arts & literature.

Zaki travelled with his easel and brushes, documenting his travels all around Egypt from El Arish to Fayoum, from Cairo to Luxor and Aswan. He spent the span of his artistic career depicting the landscapes of both urban and rural Egypt. Zaki gracefully captured scenes of everyday life in Egypt; the El Seleen well, the Attaka mountains, the ferryboats docked on the Nile and the young shepherds alongside their goats on a farm. Unlike Zaki's other body of work in these two paintings he is seen capturing the very intimate and private setting of someone's home. The warm and earthy colour palette infuses a sense of nostalgia and the shadows seen in the paintings project this almost dreamlike and mystical quality.