The Roses of Heliogabalus is an 1888 painting by the Anglo-Dutch artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema depicting the young Roman emperor Elagabalus hosting a banquet.
Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton,, known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896, was an English painter and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter. Leighton was bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history; after only one day his hereditary peerage became extinct upon his death.
Tom Friedman is an American conceptual sculptor. Friedman was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He received his BFA in graphic illustration from Washington University in St. Louis in 1988, and an MFA in sculpture from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1990. As a conceptual artist he works in a variety of mediums including, sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and installation. For over twenty years Friedman has been investigating the viewer/object relationship, and "the space in between." Friedman has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Yerba Buena Museum of Art, San Francisco, Magasin 3 in Stockholm, Sweden, The New Museum in New York, the Tel Aviv Art Museum, and others. His work can be found in the museum collections of MoMA, Los Angeles Contemporary Art Museum, the Broad Art Museum, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. He is currently represented by Luhring Augustine Gallery and Stephen Friedman Gallery. He lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts.
George Romney was an English portrait painter. He was the most fashionable artist of his day, painting many leading society figures – including his artistic muse, Emma Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson.
Muhammad VIII al-Amin known as Lamine Bey, was the last Bey of Tunisia, and also the only King of Tunisia.
Sophie Gengembre Anderson was a French-born British artist who specialised in genre painting of children and women, typically in rural settings. She began her career as a lithographer and painter of portraits, collaborating with Walter Anderson on portraits of American Episcopal bishops. Her work, Elaine, was the first public collection purchase of a woman artist. Her painting No Walk Today was purchased for more than £1 million.
The process of Tunisian Independence occurred from 1952 to 1956 between France and a separatist movement led by Habib Bourguiba. Bourguiba became the first President of the Republic of Tunisia after negotiations with France successfully brought an end to the colonial protectorate leading to independence.
George William Joy was an Irish painter in London.
Jonathan Yeo is a British artist who rose to international prominence in his early 20s as a contemporary portraitist, having painted Kevin Spacey, Dennis Hopper, Cara Delevingne, Damien Hirst, Prince Philip, Erin O'Connor, Tony Blair, and David Cameron among others. GQ has called him ‘one of the worlds most in-demand portraitists’. He was educated at Westminster School.
Simon Njami is a writer and an independent curator, lecturer, art critic and essayist.
Ayman Baalbaki is a Lebanese painter. He studied at the Lebanese University and at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs in Paris. His large-scale expressionist portraits of fighters made him one of the most popular young Arab artists.
Johan Van Mullem is a Belgian artist living and working near Brussels. He is a painter and sculptor known mainly for his depiction of faces.
eL Seed is a French-Tunisian street artist whose works incorporate traditional Arabic calligraphy, a style he calls calligraffiti. Since the 2011 Tunisian revolution, eL Seed has consciously used his art as a tool of political expression, much like Egypt's Mohamed Mahmoud graffiti. He cites the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and the Iraqi artist Sundus Abdul-Hadi as inspirational figures whose art was able to spark political change.
Ottoman Tunis refers to the episode of the Turkish presence in Ifriqiya during the course of three centuries from the 16th century until the 18th century, when Tunis was officially integrated into the Ottoman Empire as the Eyalet of Tunis (province). Eventually including all of the Maghrib except Morocco, the Ottoman Empire began with the takeover of Algiers in 1516 by the Ottoman Turkish corsair and beylerbey Oruç Reis. The first Ottoman conquest of Tunis took place in 1534 under the command of Barbarossa Hayreddin Pasha, the younger brother of Oruç Reis, who was the Kapudan Pasha of the Ottoman Fleet during the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent. However, it wasn't until the final Ottoman reconquest of Tunis from Spain in 1574 under Kapudan Pasha Uluç Ali Reis that the Turks permanently acquired the former Hafsid Tunisia, retaining it until the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881.
Nja Mahdaoui, is a Tunisian artist known for his use of calligraphy as a graphic art form. He has often been described as a ‘choreographer of letters.'
Hassan Hajjaj is a contemporary artist who lives and works between London, UK and Marrakech, Morocco, and is known as the “Andy Warhol of Marrakech.”
Ammar Farhat was a Tunisian painter. He was one of the ten members of the School of Tunis.
Nadia Kaabi-Linke is a Tunis-born, Berlin-based visual artist best known for her conceptual art and 2011 sculpture Flying Carpets. Her work has explored themes of geopolitics, immigration, and transnational identities. Raised between Tunis, Kiev, Dubai and Paris, she studied at the Tunis Institute of Fine Arts and received a Ph.D. in philosophy of art from the Sorbonne. Kaabi-Linke won the 2011 Abraaj Group Art Prize, which commissioned Flying Carpets, a hanging cage-like sculpture that casts geometric shadows onto the floor akin to the carpets of Venetian street vendors. The piece was acquired by the New York Guggenheim in 2016 as part of their Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. Kaabi-Linke also won the Discoveries Prize for emerging art at the 2014 Art Basel Hong Kong. Her works have been collected by the Museum of Modern Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Burger Collection, and Samdani Art Foundation, and exhibited in multiple solo and group shows.
Maliheh Afnan was a Palestinian-born artist.
Jellel Gasteli is a French-Tunisian photographer. He is best known for his minimalistic "White Series", which captures the geometry of light and shadow on traditional white-washed Tunisian buildings. Having lived many years in Paris, Gasteli is currently residing in Tunis.
