The Muslim Beauty

Famous for naturalistic portraiture, Akinola Lasekan was one of the early pioneers of modernism in Nigerian art in the 20th century. He and his peers were the first set of students to receive European art education. They would go on to become the first indigenous art educators and would spread the gospel of art in government colleges and mission schools across the country in the 1940’s. Besides teaching in schools, he made personal strides in democratizing art and making art education/training more accessible to people by setting up the Lash Studio Correspondence School in Lagos in 1940 where he organized and offered diploma art training courses via Correspondence. Some of the courses offered were book illustration, commercial art, colouring, landscape and figure drawing. Pictorial Naturalism was incorporated and strongly emphasized in his correspondence courses. This had a lot of influence on numerous artists in the country including the likes of Abayomi Barber whose surrealism was founded on Lasekan’s naturalism. In 2018, he was posthumously inducted into the Society of Nigerian Artists (SNA) Hall of Fame for his distinguished service to the society and the nation and his immense contribution to

Lash, as he preferred to address himself for short, loved to explore themes surrounding Yoruba myths and culture, the environment and life around him in his paintings. The Muslim Beauty, is a portrait of a young beautiful lady, probably of Yoruba decent, elegantly dressed in a yellow Muslim Hijab. Her outlook shows simplicity, decency and humility. Islam is one of the dominant religions in Western Nigeria.