Sliman Mansour, painter of Jerusalem on a porter's back, dies at 79

Sliman Mansour died on 24 August in Jerusalem at 79. His family said so the same day in an Instagram note that called him a father first and an artist second. He had been treated at Makassed Hospital for a long illness. Two days later a funeral filled St Peter's Anglican Church in Birzeit, the town north of Ramallah where he was born on 27 July 1947. The coffin went through the streets under olive branches. Condolences continued at the town's Grand Hall.

Mansour studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and graduated in 1970. The school taught abstract expressionism. He wanted faces, hills and work. The painting that fixed his name came three years later. An old porter carries Jerusalem, and the Dome of the Rock, on his back. English titles vary: The Camel of Hardships, Carrier of Hardships. The image moved off the canvas and onto posters, books and living-room walls across the Arab world.

Woman From Bethlehem, painted in 1987, is his wife. Olive groves, stone houses, embroidered thobes and citrus trees fill the rest of the decades. In the late 1980s he helped found the New Vision group. After Palestinian artists boycotted Israeli-made paints and canvases, the group worked in mud, straw, wood, leather, henna and natural dyes. The materials were a political choice and a formal one. Clay cracks. Straw fades. The work announced that it was made from the same ground it depicted.

He led the League of Palestinian Artists for a time. He contributed to the I Witness Silwan installation in East Jerusalem. In 2024 he completed On the Wing of an Angel, a mural twelve metres by six, in clay, straw and henna, at the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit. BBC correspondent Yolande Knell stood in front of that wall after the funeral and quoted Vera Tamari, a friend and fellow artist: he was the main Palestinian artist, the best known locally and internationally.

The A.M. Qattan Foundation, which works in Ramallah and London, said his art was inseparable from people, land and memory and that he had helped secure a place for Palestinian painting on a regional and global stage. Al Jazeera called him a giant of resistance art. The Art Newspaper, filing on 28 August, treated the death as the close of a generation that had built a visual vocabulary after 1948 out of farm labour and household objects.

Mansour was born a year before the State of Israel and the war that Palestinians call the Nakba. He grew up with the expulsion of more than 700,000 people as family history rather than textbook. That chronology is why a porter with a city on his back read, to his audience, as document as well as allegory. He kept using the same symbols for fifty years. Critics who wanted a break into other forms did not get one. The consistency is the point of the work.

He is buried in Birzeit. The museum mural is still on the wall. The 1973 porter is still the image that arrives first when his name is searched. What changes now is only the living authority behind those pictures. The family letter said the final chapter had been written. For the rest of the audience the chapter is the paintings, and they are already in circulation.