Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from private collection, Cairo

Born in Al-Azizya, Egypt, Shahda enrolled at the Cairo Fine Arts Academy in 1947 at the age of 18. He studied under French professor and painter Pierre Beppi-Martin. In 1955, three years after completing his studies, he received an award and held his first exhibition. By the end of that year, he decided to move to Paris.

He applied to the École des Beaux-Arts as a free student and relocated to Carpentras in the south of France, although he frequently traveled to Paris. His first solo exhibition took place in 1958 at the Arlette Chabaud Gallery in Avignon, where he won the Painting Prize from the Avignon Festival for his work "La femme en noir," now part of the Fondation Calvet collection. He also won the Aix-en-Provence Painting Prize that same year. In 1960, he held a joint exhibition with his friend Paul Surtel at the Chapelle du Collège in Carpentras.

In 1962, dissatisfied with his work, he returned to Paris. The following year, he visited Italy and Brittany, and in 1966, he returned to Provence but spent several summers in Brittany. Over the next decade, he traveled to Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Italy, exhibiting his work in Paris (Egypt Cultural Center), Avignon (Ducastel Gallery), Carpentras (Town Hall), and Marseilles. During these trips, he visited museums and admired the great masters.
In 1975, Shahda fell seriously ill. Despite this, he continued to paint, expressing a sense of urgency: "One must snatch work from passing time." During a lengthy remission, he focused on portraits, including those of fellow artists like painter Michel Bonnaud and writer Pierre Autin-Grenier, as well as self-portraits in oil and pastel.
He held exhibitions in Carpentras in 1981 and 1984. His health worsened again in 1985, but he worked harder than ever, creating still lifes, self-portraits, and landscapes despite his illness and exhaustion. He passed away from cancer in the summer of 1991 at a hospital in Aix-en-Provence.