Sophie Halaby
Palestinian watercolorist
Sophie Halaby (Arabic: صوفي حلابي; 1906–1997) was a Palestinian watercolorist who depicted Jerusalem and its surrounding landscapes. She was among the first Arab women to study art in Paris. Halaby's younger sister, Anastasia Halaby, established an embroidery workshop to employ impoverished women following the Palestinian Nakba. Halaby influenced later Palestinian artists, among them Samia Halaby (no relation) and Kamal Boullata.
Life
Halaby was born to a Palestinian-Christian father, Jiryes (George) Nicola Halaby, and a Russian-Russian Orthodox mother, Olga Akimovna Khudobasheva, an elegant but imposing woman. She was named after her paternal grandmother and was the middle child of three children. Her parents met when her father was studying medicine in St. Petersburg, Russia and at the Kyiv Theological Academy, and moved back between Jerusalem and Kyiv until settling permanently in Jerusalem in 1917. As a child, Halaby was raised in Kiev, but following the Black Sea Raids in 1914 by the Ottoman Empire and the German Navy's on the Russian ports, with the onset of World War I, the family fled as they feared Olga would be subject to persecution. Upon returning to Palestine, the family settled and lived in Musrara, a well-off neighborhood in Jerusalem's New City.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sophie Halaby” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.