César Gemayel

César Gemayel was a Lebanese painter, born in 1898 in Ain al-Touffaha near Bikfaya, who died in Beirut in 1958. He painted nudes, landscapes and still lifes in oil, watercolour and pastel, with loose, visible brushstrokes and a light palette.

He began studying pharmacology at the American University of Beirut and apprenticed in the atelier of Khalil Saleeby. In 1927 he went to Paris for three years, studying at the Académie Julian, and returned to Beirut in 1930. His landscapes record Lebanese horizons, farming and architecture at varying degrees of abstraction, and his flower paintings let petals and leaves break into patterned strokes. Mathaf in Doha holds his early oil on board Tendres épanchements (1923).

Gemayel was a founding member of the Committee of Friends of the National Museums and Archaeological Sites. In 1943 he co-founded, with Alexis Boutros, the Department of Art and Architecture at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts, where he taught. He exhibited regularly at the Lebanese Parliament and the UNESCO building in Beirut and received the Lebanese National Order of the Cedar. His work has since appeared in Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art at Mathaf (2010) and Partisans of the Nude at Columbia University's Wallach Art Gallery (2023).