Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin artist

Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin was born into a Jewish family in Poona, India in 1880 and moved to London in 1903, where he studied painting for four years at the Royal Academy Schools under John Singer Sargent and Solomon J. Solomon. Returning to India in 1908, he converted from Judaism to Islam prior to his marriage to Atiya Begum in 1912. Despite settling in Bombay (and, following partition, Karachi) Rahamin preserved close ties to the UK throughout his artistic career, holding several exhibitions and where his work is held in the Ben Uri Collection, Manchester City Art Gallery and Tate.

Born: 1880 Poona, India

Died: 1964 Karachi, Pakistan

Year of Migration to the UK: 1903

Other name/s: S. Rahamin, Samuel R. Samuel


Biography

Painter, muralist, dramatist and poet, Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin was born Samuel Rahamin Samuel into a Jewish family belonging to India’s Bene Israel community in Poona, India in 1880. He studied at the School of Art in Bombay (now Mumbai), winning a scholarship to continue his studies in London, first at the Slade School of Art and then at the Royal Academy Schools, where he was taught by John Singer Sargent and Solomon J. Solomon for four years. Their influence can be seen in his early portraits (two of which were displayed at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1906) and in his Portrait of Rosalind Adler(1906, Ben Uri Collection), a classic Edwardian image. After returning to India in 1908 to take up the role of art advisor to the Maharaja of Baroda, he abandonned the naturalism associated with Sargent’s portraits in favour of the two-dimensional figuration traditionally associated with Rajput painting, a strand of the Bengal School. It was in this style that his paintings first gained attention in the UK with an exhibition at London's Goupil Gallery in 1914. Several successful exhibitions followed, at London's Arthur Tooth’s Gallery (1925), Arlington Galleries (1935), and at Manchester City Art Gallery (1930), which received critical reviews in arts periodicals including Apollo, Burlington Magazine and Studio Magazine and The Manchester Guardian. In 1924 Fyzee-Rahamin’s work was included in the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. A year later, two of his Ragmala paintings were acquired by Tate, the first gifted by the Jewish businessman, Victor Sassoon.

Despite returning to India in 1908 after completing his studies in London, Fyzee-Rahamin preserved close ties with the British art world. In addition to exhibiting widely in the UK throughout the 1920s and 1930s, he assisted the Victoria & Albert Museum in reorganising its collection of Indian art, and submitted a proposal for a mural for India House in Aldwych. Although he was shortlisted for the latter commission, the judging committee (over which William Rothenstein presided) concluded that he was too experienced for the position. In 1926, Fyzee-Rahamin published ‘On Indian Art and Burne-Jones’, an article inspired by his experience as one of the commissioned muralists for the Imperial Secretariat in Delhi, which drew attention to the problems of cultural exchange under the British Empire. Such personal exchanges extended beyond the visual arts; in the 1930s two of Fyzee-Rahamin’s plays, Daughter of Ind and Invented Gods, were staged in London. Both were choreographed by Fyzee-Rahamin’s wife, Atiya, who was herself an important author, performer and patron of the arts and who belonged to a prominent Muslim family in Bombay. The couple had married in 1912, and Samuel had converted to Islam, with both he and Atiya, unusually, taking on each other’s family names. The Fyzee-Rahamins’ collaborations dated from 1914 when Samuel provided the illustrations for Atiya's book, Indian Music, first published by the Goupil Gallery to coincide with Samuel’s exhibition, and subsequently republished in 1925 by the London publishers, Luzac & Co, under the title The Music of India.

Following the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the Fyzee-Rahamins moved to Karachi, Pakistan in 1948. Plans to build a museum to house Fyzee-Rahamin’s paintings in the grounds of Burnes Garden in Karachi, where the couple had lived, were ultimately never realised and despite Fyzee-Rahamin’s success in the UK, the final decades of his life in Pakistan were spent in relative obscurity. Moreover, Fyzee-Rahamin’s contribution to British art was largely forgotten until the 2019 exhibition Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition held at Manchester Art Gallery – part of the broader AHRC-funded 'Black Artists & Modernism’ project – where his painting that the gallery had acquired in 1930 was displayed in dialogue with other prominent British artists, and curator Kate Jessop observed that his career 'spanned London, Bombay (now Mumbai), Paris, New Delhi, New York and Karachi, and exemplified 20th century global art networks'.

Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin died in Karachi, Pakistan in 1964. His work is held in UK public collections, including the Ben Uri Collection, Manchester City Art Gallery, and Tate. In 2021 a piece entitled Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin: the first Muslim artist in the Tate collection was posted on Art UK by doctoral researcher Hassan Vawda. In 2024, his Portrait of Rosalind Adler from the Ben Uri Collection, featured in the gallery's exhibition Heads – In and Out of Time: Lancelot Ribeiro, newly attributed to Fyzee-Rahamin and dated to 1906.

Related books

  • Mariam Saif and Aisha Khawar, 'The Art of Fyzee Rahamin: Fusion of Oriental and Occidental Traditions', Journal of Immersive Media and Creative Arts, Vol. 1 No. 2 (2021) pp. 86-110
  • Siobhan Lambert-Hurley and Sunil Sharma (eds.), 'Atiya's Journeys: A Muslim Woman from Colonial Bombay to Edwardian Britain' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
  • Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Indian Modernism (London: Reaktion, 2007)
  • Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
  • Jeremy Wood, Hidden Talents: A Dictionary of Neglected Artists Working 1880-1950 (Sussex: Jeremy Wood Fine Art, 1994)
  • Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists (London: Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, 1981) p.229
  • Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin, Invented Gods (London: Herbert Joseph, 1938)
  • Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin, Daughter of India (London: J. B. Pinker, 1937)
  • 'The Art of India: Mr Rahamin's Work', The Manchester Guardian, 6 December 1929, p. 17
  • Herbert Furst, 'Mr Fyzee Rahamin's Decorations at Delhi', Apollo, Vol. 10. Iss. 55, 1929, pp. 11-16
  • Souvenir of the Exhibition of Indian Painting, 1928, preface by S. Fyzee Rahamin (Bombay: Society for the Encouragement of Indian Art, 1928)
  • Herbert Furst, 'Mr Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin’s Paintings', Apollo, Vol. 2, July-December 1925, pp. 91-94
  • Atiya Begum and Fyzee Fyzee-Rahamin, Music of India (London: Luzac, 1925)

Public collections

Related organisations

  • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (advisor)
  • RA Schools (student)
  • School of Art, Bombay (student)
  • Slade School of Art (student)
  • Victoria and Albert Museum (advisor)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Heads – In and Out of Time: Lancelot Ribeiro, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2024)
  • Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester (2018-19)
  • American Association, New York, USA (1939)
  • Arlington Galleries, London (1935)
  • Aolian Galleries, London (1935)
  • Exhibition of Decorations for Delhi, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester (1930)
  • Burlington Galleries, London (1929)
  • India: Vedic, Mythological and Contemporary Water-Colours by S. Fyzee-Rahamin, Arthur Tooth and Sons, London (1925)
  • British Empire Exhibition, Wembley, London (1924)
  • Indian Paintings, Vedic, Mythological, Traditional, Homelife and the Mountains of Kashmir, etc. by S. Fyzee-Rahamin, M. Knoedler, New York, USA (1918)
  • Paintings by S. Fyzee-Rahamin, Goupil Gallery, London (1914)
  • Tableaux du Peintre Hindou Fyzee-Rahamin, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris (1914)
  Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin
   
Ben Uri collection

Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin in the Ben Uri collection

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin] in the Ben Uri Library