Zaki was able to leave for us an illuminating collection portraying the landscapes of Egypt, from Upper Egypt with its high Pharaonic architecture and monuments, to Lower Egypt with its more modern traditions and metropolitan vistas.
Shaaban Zaki came from a lower-middle class background who were mostly government employees, but he was distinguished from them by being heavily involved in the art and culture circles. He could not afford to study in prestigious art schools and so he studied by correspondence with an art institute in Chicago. Self-taught and self-made, he excelled within the Egyptian art scene and was able to distinguish himself during the early 20s and 40s among his colleagues.
He was a prolific author, writing about art and the next generation in the widely circulated Apollo magazine which was devoted to the Arabic world. He contributed to the cultural scene by writing articles and essays on early education of art in primary schools. Zaki, who excelled at watercolor, making it his primary medium, was able to leave for us an illuminating collection portraying the landscapes of Egypt, from Upper Egypt with its high Pharaonic architecture and monuments, to Lower Egypt with its more modern traditions and metropolitan vistas.
He was also preoccupied with exploring the differences in class societal stratas, from the ordinary workmen to the great dignitaries of his time. Zaki’s artistic travails spanned the breadth of the Egyptian landscape, from El Arish to Fayoum, from Cairo to Luxor and Aswan. He also depicted everyday life inside the Egyptian house or outside it. He was a close friend to some of Egypt’s influential figures of the intelligentsia at the time, including painter Saad El Khadem (1913-1987), and poets Hafez Ibrahim and Abbas El Ahmad. In his paintings we notice a distinctly impressionistic style that retains a quantity of realism that epitomized the early Modernist period he rose to prominence in.