The Arab world bade farewell to renowned Palestinian visual artist Sliman Mansour on August 24. He died at the age of 79, leaving behind an artistic legacy spanning more than five decades. Throughout his distinguished career, Mansour used his brush to portray Palestine—preserving its land, memory and identity against displacement and erasure.

Mansour was one of the founders of the Palestinian visual art movement and among the most important artists to turn art into a means of preserving national memory and resisting attempts to erase and distort it. His work made him a defining figure in modern Palestinian art, with images that became enduring symbols of Palestinian identity and resistance.

Born in Birzeit in the summer of 1947, about a year before the Nakba, Mansour lost his father when he was four years old. His mother raised him and his siblings, and he spent part of his childhood and youth in the Palestinian countryside, between Birzeit, Bethlehem and Beit Jala. It was there that his early connection with the Palestinian landscape took shape. The colors of the land, olive trees, lemon blossoms, the hands of farmers and scenes of rural life would later become central elements of his artistic vocabulary.

His artistic talent emerged at an early age, and at 13 he won a drawing competition organized by the United Nations. He had planned to study art in the United States, but the June 1967 war changed the course of his life. He subsequently enrolled at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, where he studied from 1967 to 1970. He later also worked professionally as a political cartoonist.

As his artistic vision matured, Mansour came to understand that the Palestine he sought to depict could not be reduced to an idyllic countryside of olive trees, citrus blossoms, harvest seasons and embroidered dresses. The land to which he belonged was burdened by a history of bloodshed, dispossession and occupation. His work therefore expanded from recording the beauty of the landscape to telling the story of modern Palestine, with its struggle, dignity and attachment to its roots.

Yet despite the darkness of that reality, Mansour never let his paintings become vessels of despair. Instead, he sought to portray Palestine through a romantic lens, preserving beauty and hope even in works most deeply connected to tragedy. In doing so, he became one of the leading pioneers of symbolic realism in Palestinian art.


‘The Camel of Hardships’

In 1973, at the age of 26, Mansour created his best-known painting, "The Camel of Hardships," which would become one of the most deeply rooted images in Palestinian collective memory. The painting depicts an elderly Palestinian man in traditional dress carrying the city of Jerusalem on his back, within a composition resembling a large eye. The image powerfully condenses the weight of Jerusalem and Palestine carried on the shoulders of their people.

The painting soon transcended the boundaries of art to become a popular and national icon. It entered Palestinian homes around the world and cemented Mansour's position as one of the most prominent ambassadors of Palestinian art.

The image also reflected a central paradox that remained present throughout his career: decades later, Palestinians were still carrying the burdens and tragedies of their homeland on their shoulders, and still carrying that story to the wider world.

"The Camel of Hardships" also has a complex history of its own. Mansour completed the first version in 1973, and for years the original was believed to have been lost. In 2015, however, Christie's revealed that the original was held by an art collector in London, after specialists examined it and confirmed that it was the 1973 version painted by Mansour.

He produced a second version in 1976. It was acquired by the Libyan ambassador in London and presented to Muammar Gadhafi, and is believed to have been destroyed during the 1986 U.S. bombing of Tripoli. In 2005, Mansour produced a third version, which became part of the Ramzi Dalloul collection in Beirut.

Among his other well-known works are "Bride of the Homeland," "Daughter of Jerusalem," "Sabra and Shatila," "Rituals Under Occupation" and "Memory of Places." Across these works, recurring elements became part of his visual language: farmers, women in embroidered dresses, olive and orange trees, Palestinian villages, the key, prisons, checkpoints, the keffiyeh, the Dome of the Rock, wheat stalks and doves, among many other features of Palestinian life.

Mansour did not paint Palestine from a distance. He drew his material from the land itself. For him, the Palestinian landscape was not merely an aesthetic backdrop but a source of symbols, materials and memory. His paintings therefore often served as visual interpretations of Palestinian heritage in its historical, geographical and social dimensions.

Art against occupation and the erasure of memory

With the beginning of the First Intifada in 1987, Mansour's relationship with natural materials took on a clear political dimension. Amid campaigns to boycott Israeli goods and calls for self-sufficiency, he began seeking locally available materials for his work. He used mud, straw, wood, chalk, lime, animal fat and natural pigments, and mixed clay with food products such as sumac, cumin, coffee and henna.

His work during that period tended toward abstraction. He later returned to a stronger focus on clay and its human and political meanings, and eventually moved back toward realism.

During the First Intifada, Mansour helped establish the "New Vision" group, which made the use of locally sourced materials part of its artistic and political stance. He also played a role in building the institutions of the Palestinian art movement, helping establish the Palestinian Artists' Association, Gallery 79, the al-Wasiti Art Center in Jerusalem and the International Academy of Art Palestine.

Alongside his work as a visual artist, Mansour taught art and worked as a political cartoonist for the Jerusalem-based al-Fajr newspaper and al-Awda magazine. He held solo exhibitions in Ramallah, New York, Sharjah, Norway and Cairo, and contributed to books documenting Palestinian traditional dress and embroidery. His work thus extended beyond painting into the preservation and documentation of Palestinian cultural identity.

Mansour recognized early on that the struggle was not being fought over land alone, but also over images and memory. Through his art, he confronted attempts to distort the image of Palestinians and strip them of their humanity and identity.

One expression of this was the recurring presence of the Holy Family in his work. He depicted Jesus wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh, seeking to reclaim the Palestinian roots of Jesus's identity and that of the Holy Family.

Palestinian women were among the most prominent symbols in his work. They appeared in traditional embroidered dresses and long headscarves, embodying the land, motherhood, fertility and abundance. This imagery was inseparable from his understanding of Palestinian identity. For Mansour, women simultaneously represented the beauty of the homeland and the strength of the human bond with land and labor, while embroidered clothing became a sign of belonging, memory and continuity.

A beautiful Palestine despite the tragedy

Mansour painted Palestine through successive stages of its tragedy, from the Nakba to occupation and the Intifadas, and eventually the war in Gaza. Yet he never abandoned his desire to preserve a beautiful image of Palestine.

In 1980, he painted "Palestinian Breakfast," depicting a table with taboon bread, tomatoes, onions and olives as an expression of resilience and self-reliance through the produce of the land. In 1990, he created "Olive Harvest," evoking one of the scenes most deeply associated with the Palestinian relationship to the land.

These works reflected a central idea in Mansour's artistic vision: preserving the beauty of Palestine was not an escape from its political reality, but a form of resistance. Once the land, the village, the olive tree, women, embroidered dress, food and Jerusalem become subjects of art, the details of everyday life themselves become repositories of memory.

In his later years, Mansour expressed his shock at the persistence and escalation of the Palestinian tragedy, particularly in Gaza. He believed Palestinians had once thought the era of the Nakba was behind them, and that modern media and communications might offer greater protection. Events, in his view, proved otherwise.

Yet he remained committed to his fundamental artistic principle: to paint Palestine without surrendering its beauty.

An artist who helped build Palestinian art

Mansour's contribution went far beyond painting. He helped build the institutional foundations of the Palestinian visual art movement and passed his experience on to younger generations of artists. He traveled widely with his work, took part in exhibitions and lectures, and mentored young artists throughout his career.

In 2024, he created his permanent mural "On the Wing of an Angel" for the Palestinian Museum, using clay, straw and henna. The natural materials were a direct extension of an artistic project that made the Palestinian land both the material and the subject of his art.

Over his decades-long career, Mansour received numerous honors, including the Palestine Prize for Plastic Arts, the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture and the Nile Award for Arab Creators. His work also earned international recognition, while his teaching at cultural institutions and universities in the occupied West Bank helped shape subsequent generations of Palestinian artists.

The unfinished painting

Until his final days, Mansour remained devoted to his brush. Shortly before his death, he was still sharing works from his archive on social media. A year before his death, he celebrated his 79th birthday, joking with his followers that every time he blew out a candle, he felt one year younger — perhaps an attempt to lighten the weight of illness and mortality.

In his final interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, he was asked about the painting he dreamed of creating but had never painted. He answered that he dreamed of painting a free and beautiful Palestine "without plastic surgery."

The answer was perhaps more than a subject for a future painting. It distilled the essence of his entire artistic project: a Palestine the world could see as it truly is, in its natural, historical and human beauty, rather than as it is reshaped or distorted by competing narratives of conflict.

Mansour died before painting that work. Yet he had spent more than half a century painting it in another form. He painted Palestine as land, Jerusalem, olive trees, women, traditional dress, villages and keys. He also painted a wounded and resistant Palestine, transforming its everyday details into symbols that transcended the canvas and entered collective memory.

From "The Camel of Hardships" to his final works, Mansour's brush was never merely a tool for artistic expression. It was a means of carrying an entire homeland. If his most famous painting portrayed Palestine carried on the back of an elderly Jerusalemite, his entire career could be seen as another act of carrying the country: its memory, its image, its land, its beauty and its suffering, from one generation to the next.

The artist is gone, but the Palestine he painted remains: a homeland whose beauty cannot be exhausted, a land of flowers and fragrance, and a memory that continues to resist erasure.