Ismail Gulgee (often spelt Gul Jee) was born in Peshawar on 25 October 1926 and became one of Pakistan’s most celebrated portraitists and modern artists. Trained originally as an engineer, he pursued art parallely and held his first exhibition of mainly portraits in 1950. By 1954, he was exhibiting in Warsak, and between 1955 and 1957 while serving as secretary at the Pakistan Embassy in Ottawa, he mounted exhibitions in Ottawa and Niagara Falls. In 1957, the Prime Minister of Pakistan commissioned him to paint King Zahir Shah of Afghanistan; a major exhibition in Kabul in 1959 displayed 151 paintings and sketches including portraits of the Afghan royal family. Through...