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Lot Essay
The two following lots illustrate two very different types of Egyptian landscapes that Egpytian master Mahmoud Saïd painted. Both works were recently re-discovered and provide further insight into the Alexandrian painter's oeuvre.
The first one, depicting a village scene on the front an a seascape on the reverse, is a rare example from Mahmoud Sa<->d's early years. Originally in the collection of Baghat El-Batanouny, Mahmoud Saïd's cousin who had married Fardous Hamada, daughter of Zeinab Hanem Mazloum, this delightful bright landscape represents most probably a village near Mansourah, where Saïd began his career as a lawyer. Painted in 1923, shortly after he came back from his trips to Europe, this village scene reveals Saïd's familiarity with the work of the French Impressionists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro, which he would have seen when he studied in Paris a few years earlier. Although executed with Impressionistic brushtrokes, Saïd's focus is on the effect of light created by the juxtaposition of carefully selected colours. His palette is dominated by a warm terracotta colour, a luminous white and grey, an olive green, all set against a vibrant light turquoise sky. The latter takes over most of the surface on the reverse for Saïd's seascape, with a wide range of nuances of this turquoise pigment. An early example of Saïd's oeuvre, it already announces the artist mastery of colour and of light.
'I had been in many locations around my country, because of my job and my art tourism, and because we were landowners in my family, I supervised and visited these lands from time to time. At the beginning of my career, when I worked in Mansoura, I painted this oeuvre with the Impressionist style; the style that I had adopted back then (...) our beloved Egyptian countryside has been the source of prosperity for us and the artistic inspiration to many of our oeuvres.' (M.Saïd, 'Memoirs from my Paintings', in E.Dawastashy, One Hundred Years of Creativity, Cairo, 1997; translated from Arabic by Suzanne Beltagy).
The first one, depicting a village scene on the front an a seascape on the reverse, is a rare example from Mahmoud Sa<->d's early years. Originally in the collection of Baghat El-Batanouny, Mahmoud Saïd's cousin who had married Fardous Hamada, daughter of Zeinab Hanem Mazloum, this delightful bright landscape represents most probably a village near Mansourah, where Saïd began his career as a lawyer. Painted in 1923, shortly after he came back from his trips to Europe, this village scene reveals Saïd's familiarity with the work of the French Impressionists such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and Camille Pissarro, which he would have seen when he studied in Paris a few years earlier. Although executed with Impressionistic brushtrokes, Saïd's focus is on the effect of light created by the juxtaposition of carefully selected colours. His palette is dominated by a warm terracotta colour, a luminous white and grey, an olive green, all set against a vibrant light turquoise sky. The latter takes over most of the surface on the reverse for Saïd's seascape, with a wide range of nuances of this turquoise pigment. An early example of Saïd's oeuvre, it already announces the artist mastery of colour and of light.
'I had been in many locations around my country, because of my job and my art tourism, and because we were landowners in my family, I supervised and visited these lands from time to time. At the beginning of my career, when I worked in Mansoura, I painted this oeuvre with the Impressionist style; the style that I had adopted back then (...) our beloved Egyptian countryside has been the source of prosperity for us and the artistic inspiration to many of our oeuvres.' (M.Saïd, 'Memoirs from my Paintings', in E.Dawastashy, One Hundred Years of Creativity, Cairo, 1997; translated from Arabic by Suzanne Beltagy).