Halim developed her most confident and original art in folkloric impressionism. Her final period was focused on Nubia, which she accomplished in a distinctly impressionist zeal, becoming the style she was subsequently credited for introducing.
Tahia Halim was born in Cairo while her primary education took place inside the Royal Palace where she was raised, as her father was the chief laureate of King Fouad. In high school she took two years off to learn French, piano and painting under the stewardship of Youssef Taraboulsi, under whom she studied the famed academicism French painter and sculptor Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824-1904), then under artist Hamed Abdullah (1917-1985) at his studio in 1943. She married Abdullah in 1945 and left for Paris to join Académie Julian where she spent three years from 1949 to 1951.
She returned to Egypt in 1951 and began exhibiting in solo and group exhibitions, as well as major international events such as the Biennales of; Alexandria, Italy, Brazil, Sweden, England, France, Poland and finally in the U.S.A. in 1982. Her artwork has been divided into three periods, the first of which from 1941 to 1951 was a period of classical composition.
From 1952 to 1962 Halim developed her most confident and original art in folkloric impressionism. Her final period was focused on Nubia, which she accomplished in a distinctly impressionist zeal, becoming the style she was subsequently credited for introducing. This compositional method gave a certain weathered effect to her works which make them feel almost as if they were relics of antiquity.
In 1984, she started teaching painting in her atelier in Cairo. Halim was awarded the Guggenheim prize in 1958 and was decorated by the Egyptian government in 1968. Some of her works reside at the Guggenheim in New York, the Modern Museum of Egyptian Art in Cairo, and in Stockholm.