Footnotes

Provenance:
Property from a private collection, London
Acquired directly from the Artist, early 1970s
Thence by descent to the present owner


The work of celebrated Palestinian artist, Ismail Shammout is often considered a visual chronicle of Palestinian history during and after the 1948 Nakba, or "catastrophe." Active since the early 1950s, Shammout portrays the tragedies, traditions, and determined steadfastness of the Palestinians.

Motherhood in Green is an emotionally captivating composition; here Shammout celebrates and glorifies motherhood by painting allusions to the religious icons of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. The mother has her arms wrapped around her new born baby also suggesting the coming together of a family and the intimate and eternal bond between the mother and the child regardless of their fear and displacement due to the war. Shammout's paintings convey a sense of collective hardship and pain, affirming his belief that suffering, whilst outwardly malign, also tends to bind people, and acts in some ways as a universal emotional language through which we can achieve a form of mutual empathy.

Shammout and his family were expelled from their home by Israeli forces in 1948. The aspiring artist spent his childhood in a refugee camp in Khan Younes in Gaza before enrolling at the College of Fine Arts in Cairo. Upon graduating, he held his first solo exhibition in 1953 in Gaza, where he exhibited his renowned painting, Where To?. In 1954, he continued his studies in Rome, later serving as the inaugural Director of Arts and National Culture for the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beirut in 1965 and the Secretary General of the Union of Arab Artists in 1971. Together with his wife and fellow artist, Tamam al-Akhal, Shammout contributed to the development of an infrastructure for Palestinian art and exhibited worldwide. In 2002, Barjeel Art Foundation founder Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi visited an exhibition of Palestinian artists Ismail Shammout and Tammam Al-Akhal at the Dubai Chamber of Commerce. This was the first major exhibition by Arab artists that he had visited, an encounter that left an important mark that shaped the outlook of the collector.