Omar Onsi

Omar Onsi was a Lebanese painter, born in Beirut in 1901, who died there on 3 June 1969. He painted landscapes, village scenes and figures in oil and watercolour, working from long observation followed by rapid, direct brushwork; he also made a few figurines in clay and bronze.

He trained with Khalil Saleeby in Beirut from about 1920. In the 1920s he taught at the royal court in Amman, where he drew the local population, then studied at private academies in Paris before returning to Beirut in 1930. His subject was what he called natural views: the Lebanese countryside, its inhabitants and its light, treated as a moral rather than a personal vision. An untitled landscape of about 1938 was shown in Echoes of Existence in 2026.

Onsi taught at several Beirut institutions and helped found the Society of the Friends of the Arts in 1934. He co-founded the Lebanese Artists Association of painters and sculptors in 1957 and joined the board of the Sursock Museum at its founding in 1960. His work was shown at the New York World's Fair (1939), the Bezalel Museum, Jerusalem (1943), and the São Paulo Biennial (1965). The Sursock Museum held his retrospective in 1997; Mathaf in Doha holds his work.