Hamed Owais, Peasant Family, 1959, Oil on Canvas, 99.5 x 80 cm.

Mohammed Hamed Owais (1919 Beni Soueif – 2011 Cairo) was an Egyptian artist born in 1919 to a peasant family in the village of Kafr Mansour in the governorate of Beni Soueif in Egypt. He completed his early and secondary education in his hometown and worked briefly as a metalworker afterward before quitting his job to follow his passion for art. He moved to Cairo and enrolled at the School of Fine Arts graduating in 1944. Owais was a principal painter in the genre of social realism, representing the daily struggles of the Egyptian working-class including peasants, fishermen and craftsmen to list but a few. In this painting for example, a barefoot peasant family is carrying wood and agricultural hand tools with their young son and a friendly dog as a companion. As Owais was raised in a rural setting himself, he developed this experience as an identifiable theme in his important body of work.