(1860 - 1938)

Habib Srour was ten years old when his parents moved to Rome. He studied there at the Institute of Fine Arts.
  In 1890 he returned to Beirut after a long stay in Egypt. He taught art at the Imperial Ottoman School of Bashoura and in his own studio.
  Srour was much in demand as a portrait painter of Lebanese and Arab personalities of the day, religious, social or political figures in the Ottoman Empire. In 1934, the newspaper La Syrie organized a major exhibition at the Saint George Hotel in which Srour participated.
  As with all the artists of his generation, Habib Srour was faithful to the classical school but this did not prevent him from breaking out of the narrow framework of formalism in order to give himself some liberty in the choice and treatment of his subjects.
  In his religious work he was content to follow the well-worn paths of his predecessors and to confine his art to the tastes of his patrons, in his still-life he appears as an artist convinced of his talent. When dealing with reality,
  Srour intends more to draw attention to the infinite beauty concealed within the bosom of nature rather than simply to exercise his skill at reproduction.