Srour Habib 

Beirut, 1863-1938

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Habib Srour was born in Beirut in 1863, but did not see the city’s social scene as essential, because he was from a cultural minority in XIXth-century Beirut, in which representation was divided according to socio-cultural groups. He lived in Rome until 1882 and then, for his health, moved to Naples. From there, he went on a tour to Egypt, where he found a more lively and stable society than Beirut’s, but where he was only one painter among many.

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On his return to Lebanon in 1908, his patrons and benefactors helped him open a portrait studio, and he then became Professor of Drawing at the Ottoman School of Beirut. Under the French Mandate, the era and environment were no longer his own; he was only an ageing painter with a typically Italian brio in his approach of the subject.

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He was a painter in a country where art was in its infancy and did not ask questions about painting, but about the illusion of rendering of these questions : representation, influences and, for him, style. This was a brand new notion, an addition made to technique, in order to say that art did not only come from craftsmanship, but also from his neurotic detailing, which went beyond resemblance. He knew this was a false perspective, but it could back up the requirements of his individuality when facing the world, and his need to preserve a kind of order, to prevent him from sinking into his internal chaos.

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How aware of his art was he ? Mourani considered him an Ottoman painter, and considered himself as more sensitive to the urban Maronite base where Giusti, Corm and Spiridon seemed to belong better than Srour, with his anguish and doubt. Was Srour less settled than Corm in Lebanese society and painting scene ? He did not return to the naivety of copying, which Corm frequently resorted to, largely because of the nervous and ironic aspects of his character. Srour was marked by the taste of his masters – the academic apprenticeship of Italy, which confined generations of Lebanese painters to the difficulty of finding cultural correspondence. 

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When the first Lebanese painters returned from Italy, they often reduced reality to mere copy, down to the very last detail in their drawings, paintings and reproductions. It was a passive copying, and Orientalism did not transcend such distortion, in its attempts to characterise the Oriental reality, which lay at the opposite extreme. 

They should not be reproached for their lack of modernity; they made the contemporary painting of their era, which allowed them to adapt to their times, as artisans of reproduction in a society where paintings were a social products that ensured identity, like a guarantee of pedigree. The definition of a painter and his place in society was precise, and did not have the role that we want to assign today. To be a painter was to stand in front of one’s easel every day. While playing with the most rhetorical Italian methods, Srour made sure they did not trifle with him. If he had an illusion to make, it was without any illusions. Up to a point, it could be said that his refusal of all illusion, fakery and juggling was a moral issue.

Srour had a period of precisely detailed portraiture, attempting to surpass reality through painting in a magic operation of translation. Srour never forced this reality, however. The perfect example is a canvas on one subject: the Bedouin, which Corm also painted, posing the problem of sensitivity. In Srour’s other periods, a certain lassitude stood between him, reality and the painting. In this genre of painting, any singularity is excluded and the slightest hint of style is defeated in a craftsmanship destined for the vilayet.

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The manner in which Srour entered into History of Art, was the manner in which he made this history a part of his painting, with all that he wanted to influence and elaborate : the junction of technique and commissions that reflected public taste. What he painted, in his meticulous way in a dark palette, was the gloominess of reproducing reality, and the crisis of the response of Italian painting at the end of the XIXth century.

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Douaihy, who was his assistant at the end of his life, said one day at Champigny-sur-Marne that Srour “damaged his eyes with ten gold pounds portraits”. 

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In 1931 Srour took part in a group exhibition at the School of Arts and Trades and in 1934 in an exhibition at the Hotel Saint Georges organised by Georges Vayssié.