Abdul Qadir Al Rassam

Abdul Qadir Al Rassam,عبد القادر الرسام), 1952 - 1882), was born in Baghdad, Iraq. He was the first well-known painter in modern Iraq and the leader of realism school in Iraq. He studied military science and art at the Military College, Istanbul, Turkey, (then the capital of the Ottoman Empire) from 1904. He studied art and painting in the European traditional style and became a landscape painter, he painted many landscapes of Iraq in the realism style, using shading and composition to suggest time periods. He was a major figure among the first generation of modern Iraqi artists and was a member of the Art Friends Society (AFS, Jami’yat Asdiqa’ al-Fen). A collection of his work is hung in The Pioneers Museum, Baghdad. A prolific painter of oils, the majority of his works are now in private hands.