Hamed Nada devoted much of his art to themes of the poor and working class Egyptians, and often referenced Sufi symbols and practices. In Fortune-teller and the Cat, he revisits themes and compositions of the Contemporary Art Group in Cairo that he belonged to in the late 1940s. The title is a reference to magic and folk culture. As the son of a sheikh at the local mosque in the Sayyeda Zeinab neighbourhood of Cairo, Nada had seen these symbols and street festivals where charms and tokens of luck were sold. In his painting, the hand symbol on the wall denotes luck or fortune and in the child’s hands refers to the charm cards that were popular and sold as inserts to newspapers. The tattoos on the child’s arms denote luck or power over harm or evil and the large qila or water vase is shaped in the style of Upper Egyptian vases.

Nada was a student of Husayn Yusuf Amin, the influential art teacher. He was an important illustrator for literary magazines, including Al-Thaqafah. He was a graduate School of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1951, where he then became a professor of painting. He also received a diploma from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid. This drawing is among the artist’s final works before his tragic death in an accidental fall in a power outage.