Shafic Abboud (1926-2004) was a prominent Lebanese modernist painter. He studied under the tutorship of Cesar Gemayel at Academie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (Alba). In the late 1940s, Shafic Abboud moved to Paris and worked in the ateliers of cubist painters Jean Metzinger, André Lhote and Fernand Léger before joining the Beaux-Arts de Paris. In the early 1960s, he gained recognition and obtained many awards, including Prix Victor Choquet in 1961 and Sursock Museum Prize in 1964.

Shafic Abboud spent most of his life in France; thus, he remained attached to Lebanon and stayed there regularly. He was deeply affected by the war that devastated Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. His work, which is inscribed in the European tendencies of abstraction that emerged after World War II, is always related to places – gardens, rooms, houses, landscapes - and figures which is also the case in the present painting.

“Shafic Abboud is an ontological painter. Ever since he started working, charming people, and labouring, he has never stopped over a detail, he has never sacrificed to the tale. What he wants, the ambition that is all his own, is the cosmic recitative. There is a hymn sung by the entirety of the universe on which his window, his eyes open. The rags of that hymn are what his canvas intends to trap slowly, patiently, subtly”, writes poet Salah Stétié. 

Abboud has been widely displayed in major institutions. In 2020, he was part of Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha. In 2011, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, organised a retrospective of his work, curated by Claude Lemand, where this piece was included.