Painter, muralist, dramatist and poet Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin was born Samuel Rahamin Samuel to a Jewish family belonging to India’s Bene Israel community in Poona (now Pune), India on 19 December 1880. He studied at the School of Art in Bombay, and then, on a scholarship in London at the Slade School of Fine Art (1903), and the Royal Academy school (1904-09) under John S. Sargent and Solomon J. Solomon, where his cohort included J H Amshewitz. His tutors’ influence can be seen in his Portrait of Rosalind Adler (1906, Ben Uri Collection), a typical Edwardian portrait of a young girl and almost certainly a commission. In 1906 he also exhibited a naturalistic portrait (no. 765 The Derelict) at the Royal Academy.
In 1908 Samuel returned to India, becoming art advisor to the Maharaja of Baroda and abandoned naturalism in favour of the two-dimensional figuration traditionally associated with Rajput painting, a strand of the Bengal school. He maintained his connections with Britain, exhibiting critically acclaimed paintings in the latter style at galleries including the Goupil Galleries, London (1914), as well as Galerie Georges Petit, Paris (1914), the Knoedler Gallery, New York (1918), Arthur Tooth’s (1925) and the Arlington Galleries (1935), both in London, and Manchester City Art Gallery (1930). In 1924 his work was included in the British Empire Exhibition in Wembley and in 1925, he became the first Muslim artist to enter the Tate when two of his Ragmala paintings were acquired for its collection (one gifted by the Jewish businessman Victor Sassoon, the other presented by the State of Bhavnagar). In the 1930s, he helped the Victoria & Albert Museum reorganise its collection of Indian art and submitted a shortlisted proposal for a mural for India House in Aldwych. In 1926 as Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin he published an article ‘On Indian Art and Burne-Jones’, inspired by his commission as a muralist for the Delhi Imperial Secretariat and highlighting the difficulties of cultural exchanges under the auspices of the British Empire.
In the 1930s two of his plays were staged in London, choreographed by his wife, Atiya Fyzee-Rahamin, an important author, performer and patron of the arts, who belonged to a prominent Muslim family in Bombay. Prior to their marriage in 1912, Samuel converted to Islam and both he and Atiya unusually took each other’s family names. In 1914 Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin illustrated Atiya Fyzee-Rahamin’s book ‘Indian Music’, published by the Goupil Gallery to coincide with Samuel’s exhibition (later re-published in 1925 by Luzac & Co under the title ‘The Music of India’).
In 1948, the Fyzee-Rahamins moved to Karachi, Pakistan following the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin died in Karachi, Pakistan on 1 January 1964. His work is held in UK collections including the Ben Uri Collection, Manchester City Art Gallery and Tate. He presented a collection of his own paintings and other artworks to the Aiwan-e-Riffat Museum in Karachi, intended to be housed in a separate building as the Fyzee Rahamin Art Gallery, a project which has not currently been realised. Posthumously in the UK, his work has featured in group exhibitions including 'Speech Acts: Reflection-Imagination-Repetition' at Manchester Art Gallery (2018-19), 'Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniature Painting and Britain, 1600 to Now' at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes and The Box, Plymouth (2024), and the exhibition of Heads from the Ben Uri Collection, supporting 'Lancelot Ribeiro - Heads In and Out of Our Time' at Ben Uri Gallery (2024).
