Biography
Early Years in Beirut and Academic Art training in Paris
Born in Beirut in 1875, Philippe Mourani grew up in a Maronite Christian, French-speaking, milieu, and received his first drawing lessons at the Jesuit-run Saint Joseph University. After his studies in Beirut, he spent five years in Rome, and then continued to Paris, where he enrolled at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts. There, he was trained in the Academic tradition, which emphasised rigorous draughtsmanship and verisimilitude, studying under professors such as Jean-Paul Laurens (1838–1921), a prominent French History painter.
Upon graduation from the Beaux-Arts, Mourani gained rapid recognition on the French art circuit: in 1901, the Centre national des arts plastiques, the French state body responsible for public art collections, acquired a watercolour depicting daily life in Mount Lebanon, showing a male peasant sells fruit to a woman clad in traditional Druze clothing. In the two decades that followed, Mourani led a peripatetic career, dividing his time between Paris, on the one hand, where he established residence, and the Levant and North Africa, on the other. He returned to Beirut several times, joined French archaeologists on missions in Jordan and Egypt, and also travelled to Syria and Algeria. Mourani's first-hand experience of these regions provided him with subject matter for several series of paintings portraying their inhabitants, landscapes, and monuments, which he presented regularly at important exhibitions in Paris, such as the Salon de la Société des artistes français and the Exhibition of the French Orientalist Painters. These earned him positive reviews in the French art press, who praised his attention to detail and was impressed by his geographic mobility, as he shuttled every few months between France, North Africa, and the Levant.
An Orientalist painter from the Levant in Paris
Mourani was based in Cairo during World War I and returned to Paris in 1920. During the 1920s, he often showed at the conservative Salon des Artistes français, whose prestige endured despite the competition of Modernism. In Paris, Mourani catered to a significant segment of the art public whose interest in images of the Near East and North Africa endured, in the context of French imperialism in the 1920s. The paintings he exhibited in France followed tropes of Orientalist painting, since they highlighted the Orient’s supposed timelessness, decay, attachment to religious traditions, exoticism, and, infrequently, the erotic lure of the Oriental body. By aligning with such conventions, Mourani achieved visibility within a receptive Parisian framework.
He painted ancient sites, such as the ruins of the Roman temples of Baalbek in Lebanon, as well as historical mosques and churches. His scenes of daily life in Cairo and Damascus include public gathering places, such as fountains, spaces for trade like busy souks an artisan workshops, and for entertainment, with scenes of musicians and cafes. Mourani also ventured away from cities to paint village life and natural settings almost untouched by humankind, spanning the Egyptian deserts and the cedar tree forests in Mount Lebanon.
Mourani's activity in Beirut during the French Mandate Period
In the interwar period, although he was based in Paris, Mourani played a significant role in bolstering the burgeoning art scene in French-Mandate-era Beirut. Throughout the 1930s, the city witnessed a surge in large-scale public art exhibitions, a European art display format almost unheard-of to that date. Mourani took part in nearly all of the decade's major collective exhibitions, from a 1931 show of painting and engraving at the School of Arts and Crafts to the prestigious Salon des Amis des Arts, between 1938 and 1942. By the late 1940s, Lebanese art writers acknowledged him as one of the most important artistic talents that had emerged from their country of the first half of the 20th century, and praised his mastery of the formal principles of academic painting. However, they considered his style outdated and out of phase with Modernist trends.
Governmental commissions for Lebanon under the French Mandate
Mourani received several commissions from the French Mandate authorities. After the proclamation of the State of Greater Lebanon on 1 September 1920, he was tasked to paint General Henri Gouraud, the French high commissioner, standing triumphant atop of the stairs of his residence, surrounded by Christian and Muslim religious dignitaries and local political figures. In 1931, Mourani was instrumental in setting up the Levantine States Pavilion at the Exposition Coloniale de Vincennes in France. Designed by Syrian architect Ulysse Moussalli (1899–1987), the structure was organised into several sections, each representing one of Levantine States under Mandate. Mourani was charged with the interior design of the entire pavilion, and also exhibited paintings that underscored the connection between the contemporary mandatory states and Roman and Biblical history: he showed a panorama of the Roman temples of Baalbek and a painting of the cedars of Lebanon, a view of Palmyra, Syria, and another of Antakya, Turkey. At the occasion of the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, in 1937, Mourani was again called upon to contribute to the Levantine States Pavilion, this time with Phoenician-inspired furniture and interior design.
Mourani was also close to Lebanese Christian politicians allied with France, such as Emile Eddé (1883–1949), his friend and client, who was president of the Lebanese Republic between 1936 and 1941. During Eddé's tenure, Mourani was invited to participate in the promotion of tourism in Lebanon and to modernise the image of Lebanon abroad. In 1936, he won a competition to design a series of postage stamps representing skiing in Mount Lebanon, conceived to promote the country's newly-built winter sport stations. Two years later, he conceived a stamp commemorating the 10-year anniversary of the Marseilles-Beirut air route. Mourani also designed postage stamps with diverse nationalistic themes, including the Roman temples of Baalbek, the 19th-century palace of the Mount Lebanon Emirs in Beiteddine, the 1937 Levantine States Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale in Paris, and the cedar tree.
Mourani in the print media
In the 1920s, Mourani’s paintings reached a wider public through print media. His works were reproduced in illustrated newspapers and magazines such as Le Petit Parisien, Le Figaro illustré, and L’Illustration. He also produced illustrated French-language novels and had landscape paintings reproduced in guidebooks to Lebanon and Syria in the interwar period.
The painter also published his theories about art in Lebanese Francophone magazines. He believed in the didactic and moral virtues of art and drew a link between artistic education and social betterment. He also encouraged art and art history education in his native country as nation-building tool and praised France for allowing Lebanese culture to be represented in international exhibitions abroad. In the late 1930s, in collaboration with journalist Robert Abela, he also created a new set of Arabic printing characters in which letters were separated rather than connected to simplify mechanic printing.
Mourani settled in France definitively in 1940. His activity slowed down after World War II, and he passed away in Paris in 1970.
