111042

Study portrait

Ahmed Hassanein Bey 1929

Head and shoulders in three-quarter profile to the left, wearing a grey suit and tie with a white shirt

Oil on board. 71.7 x 47.5 cm (28 ¼ x 18 ¾ in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / 1929

Laib L15804(175) / C12(10)

New Place Hotel, Southampton

In January 1929 de László travelled to Cairo in Egypt to paint King Fuad I [110671] and his son Prince Farouk [4122]. The King was pleased with the four portraits the artist painted of him [113256][4094][4099] and appointed the artist Grand Officer of the Order of Ismail, Egypt. It is not known if the present portrait was painted in Egypt or London but Hassanein Bey noted in an article for the Daily Sketch in 1929 that it was completed in two hours and hung it in his home in London.^[1]

De László found the landscape and people of Egypt inspiring and he painted seventeen pictures near Aswan and Luxor for his own pleasure during an extended stay in the country with his wife Lucy and son Paul. They filmed their meeting with the Bishari tribe and themselves riding camels with a Ciné-Kodak model B, one of the first home movie cameras, presented to de László by George Eastman [4994] of Eastman Kodak in thanks for his portrait painted in New York in 1925.            

Ahmed Mohamed Makhlouf Hassanein al-Bulaki, known as Ahmed Hassanein Bey, was born on 31 October 1889 in Bulaq, the royal and industrial Nile port of Cairo. His father was a Professor at Al-Azhar; his grandfather Ahmed Pasha Mazhar Hassanein the last Admiral of the Egyptian fleet. Hassanein Bey was educated in Cairo and graduated in 1914 from Balliol College at the University of Oxford. During the First World War he served as the Arab Secretary to General Maxwell, British Commanding Officer in Cairo in 1914. He was appointed a Member of the British Empire (MBE) and received the 1915 star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.

Hassanein Bey was a renowned explorer and published The Lost Oases (1925), which describes his 1923 journey of 2,200 miles by camel from the Egyptian port of Sollum on the shores of the Mediterranean to Al Obeid Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. He led the seven-month expedition which discovered the oases of Jebel Arkenu and Jebel Ouenat and he was awarded the Founder’s Medal by the Royal Geographical Society in 1924.

In 1924 he was appointed First Secretary of the Egyptian Legation in Washington, D.C. From 1925 to 1936 he was adviser to King Fuad and tutor of Crown Prince Farouk during his studies in London. He also served as Chamberlain to Queen Nazli between 1936 and 1946. He came to be considered one of the most influential men in Egypt.

Hassanein Bey was also an accomplished fencer and represented Egypt in the Olympic Games in Brussels 1920 and Paris 1924.

In 1926 he married Lutfia Hanem (born 1905), daughter of Seyfullah Yousri Pasha, first Egyptian Ambassador to Washington D.C., and Princess Shivakiar Hanem Effendi, ex wife of King Fuad. They later divorced.

Hassanein Bey died on 19 February 1946, killed in a car accident involving a British military vehicle and he was buried in the Mameluke Northern Cemetery, Cairo.  

PROVENANCE:

The sitter;

Collection of the descendants of Mehmet Ali of Egypt;

Sold at Mallié-Arcelin, Paris, Historical Collections of the Royal House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, 12 March 2020, lot 187

KF 2022