A gifted Egyptian painter, writer, illustrator and draftsman, Hassan Soliman was born in Cairo, in 1928. He graduated from the Cairo School of Fine Arts in 1951 and from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan in 1966. After his studies, Soliman painted tirelessly for 60 years. An art and literature critic, some of his publications include The Artist's Freedom, Motion in Art and Life, How to Read a Picture and The Psychology of Calligraphy, to name a few. He founded many Avant-Garde publications on which he also worked as a graphic designer. 

Soliman was inspired by European Romanticism and the dramatic and tragic aspects of the human condition seen in Goya’s Shooting of the Third of May or Picasso’s Guernica. Through the emotive quality of his work, he represents the plainest form of truth highlighting themes like boredom, sadness, reclusion, poverty and famine. Even his still-life paintings are imbued with raw emotion. He paints with a blend of abstract and figurative style, often reducing his subjects to specter-like figures. At times straying from conventional colors, Soliman portrays some of his characters with colored masks as if they are playing a role in a tragic masquerade. 

Soliman’s works have been exhibited mostly in Kuwait, Cairo and the UAE and are part of art collections such as the Egyptian Museum of Modern Art, Cairo, Egypt; the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Cairo, Egypt; the Al-Sharekh Art Collection, Dubai, United Arab Emirates and the Ramzi and Saeda Dalloul Art Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon.

In this painting, the mise-en-scene of a lonely boy in the foreground with a ghostly village behind him, looks like a frozen frame taken from a movie scene. Soliman represents an isolated moment in a silent space. The piece is bathed in a white, natural light with a gray tint that sweeps across the surface of the canvas; his sense of colors gives to the artwork a melancholic and poetic feeling that echoes Edward Hopper’s realist painting.