No visions, no voices will herald my death
O Angel of Serenity
Be at my side
Restlessness springs from the core of my being
Ah, Peace! Come to me the day
Death does arrive

Rubaiyat of Sadequain, translated by Mahmoud Jamal, Sadequain, The Holy Sinner, Karachi, 2003

Syed Waliullah (1922–1971) was a Bengali novelist, short-story writer and playwright, from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Born in Chittagong in British India, Waliullah emerged as one of the most significant Bengali literary figures of the mid-twentieth century.
Following Partition in 1947, Waliullah moved from Calcutta to Dhaka and worked for Radio Pakistan, before transferring to Karachi in 1949. He then joined the civil service and served as press attaché in New Delhi from 1951–52. Over the next decade he served in Australia, Indonesia, Pakistan and Europe, finally settling in Paris in 1961 as the First Secretary to the Embassy of Pakistan. Waliullah also wrote several articles on contemporary artists for Pakistani and French journals, including texts on Zubeida Agha, Zainul Abedin and Sadequain, amongst others.

Alongside his diplomatic work, Waliullah was also Pakistan’s Commissioner-General for the 1961 Paris Biennale. Due to the submission of too many works to the 1961 biennale committee, it was his responsibility to select those to represent Pakistan. For Sadequain, he chose his monumental painting The Last Supper. For this work, Sadequain was declared a Laureate in the under-35 category. Part of the prize was a six-month residency grant, worth 800 francs a month, which enabled him to remain and work in France, marking the beginning of an important period in his career in Paris. As a prize winner, his paintings and drawings were exhibited at the Maison de Culture du Havre in 1962 alongside Flavio Shiro and Kuzgun Acar.

French archives also show that three of Sadequain’s works were bought for the French state by the art critic and general delegate of the Paris Biennale, Raymond Cogniat. He selected two drawings, Towards Light and Judgement in Paris, and an oil painting, Mother and Child, for a total of 1,150 francs.

Syed Waliullah was also a patron of Sadequain’s and owned several works by the artist. Untitled (The Angel of Serenity) was painted around 1963 and appears in several dated sketches from that period. The heavily textured background is made up entirely of his sgraffito technique of layering paint, then scratching it off again to reveal form and depth – something also seen in A Group of Standing Figures and Teaching in Paris.

The imagery corresponds to a couplet written by Sadequain where he tells of his desire to have the Angel of Serenity by his side when death came to him. In this painting, the artist’s hands reach out of the abyss, grasping for the divine figure floating above him. In 1963, journalist Thomas Dowling wrote of Sadequain’s obsession with his hands in an article for the journal Panorama:
“...he is nonetheless a man of prodigious energy. The summary of this energy is in his long thin hands, which are constantly in motion. Artists are often obsessed with their own faces and revel in self-portraiture; Sadequain is obsessed with his hands. He has painted these hands with their hooked knuckles and distended, clutching fingers over and over again until his hands have become a second signature in his paintings.”
Thomas Dowling, ‘Pakistan’s Prolific Painter’, Panorama, September 1963

Elements of the finished painting appear in several sketches and preparatory works, created in 1962 and ‘63. As was often seen in his work, Sadequain would revisit the image of the Angel of Serenity several times over the next 25 years of his life.