Javad Hamidi is one of the early Iranian avant-garde painters as well as the teacher of many prominent figures of Iranian modern art. Combining landscape and modern painting, Hamidi has created a modern, exquisite work inspired by the achievements of Iranian landscape painters that illustrates the pastoral world of the Romantic literature of the 19th century. In fact, depiction of everyday life of the poor is an achievement of a group of Iranian painters, starting with Behzad during the Safavid period and continuing with the work of realist painters.
As an early modern painter, Hamidi was just as concerned about the choice of colors and their combination as he was about composition. Composition and visual balance in the present work indicate the technical and academic approach of the artist toward art. The focal point of the painting is the centerpiece, where the elderly woman is staring at the audience. His paintings are characterized by a greyscale as well as unelaborate shades of green and blue. These provisions distinguish Hamidi’s work from that of the academic painters of the Kamal-ol-Molk School of Painting. Still, the diversity of his work makes it difficult for spectators to recognize structural properties of his paintings.
Hamidi’s probing mind was cultivated at a time when the fresh experiments of early modernists coincided with the presence of the last followers of the Kamal-ol-Molk School of Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts. The dual climate of this work clearly indicates the polarized art scene of the time. Javad Hamidi along with Hossein Kazemi and Jalil Ziapour learned Iranian landscape painting from Ali Mohammad Heydarian – a very special student of Kamal-ol-Molk and that of the School of Fine Arts – and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts in 1945. Hamidi’s capability of drawing and applying paint during the years of study soon captured the attention of instructors at the Faculty of Fine Arts so that he was employed, at the recommendation of Heydarian, by the University of Tehran once he graduated. One year after he began his teaching career at the University of Tehran, Hamidi obtained a scholarship from Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris to become a student of André Lhote. Hamidi, Ziapour, Kazemi, Javadipour, Pezeshknia, and Vaziri Moghaddam were early graduates of European schools who promoted western modern interpretations in Iranian art. Javad Hamidi was awarded the first prize of the Tehran Painting Biennial in 1969.