Mahmoud Said’s painting 'Dervishes' holds its position as most expensive in Middle East

CAIRO – 2 June 2022: Bonhams Auctions sold many paintings of the pioneers of Egyptian plastic art, including the artist Mahmoud Said.

The auction house sold nearly five paintings, including the “Tomb,” but they all could not exceed the price of the “Dervishes” by Mahmoud Said.

"Dervishes" by Egypt's Mahmoud Said - social media

In April 2010, Christie's  Auctions sold the "Dervishes" for $2.434 million. At the time of its sale, it was recorded as the most expensive painting drawn by a Middle Eastern artist in the modern era. The painting dates back to 1935.

“Dervishes” is one of Said’s early works. It shows six Mevlevi dervishes with similar features and similar clothes, and with differences in the position of each of them while performing religious remembrances in the Ottoman eras. Throughout his artistic career, Said worked on the religious topic, and the ideas of death, burial, the afterlife, mysticism and worship.

Said painted the "Dervishes" in 1935, in the phase of employing Western methods in painting, but he was the unique model that digested these methods, and adapted them to draw intimate Egyptian paintings.