Marguerite Nakhla’s Scene dans le parc, from the 1940s, is a folk realist painting depicting gatherings of women, men, and children in a public space. The artist preferred to describe her own work with the moniker “folk” rather than as high art. A student at the College of Fine Arts in Cairo, Nakhla completed her studies at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1934 to 1939. She then taught art in Egypt, and began exhibiting. Her famous painting,al-Bursa (Stock Exchange) (1940) at the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, a satire on the frenzied madness of the market, was compared to Breugel, the 16th century Flemish artist, by the art critic Izz al-Din Najib. She moved back to Paris between 1952 and 1954, but returned to Egypt to exhibit from the 1950s to 1975.

Among the first women artists in Egypt and the Arab world, Nakhla received little attention among scholars until recent years. In 2016, retrospective of her work in Canada was sponsored by St. Mark’s Coptic Museum in exchange for her donation of renderings of Coptic religious imagery in tempera on wood panels, and a series of paintings of the Virgin, that were given to St. Mary’s Coptic Church in Zamalek. Her experience in Paris overlapped with the Egyptian Surrealist author George Henein, the artist Ramses Younan, and the writer Albert Cossery, all of whom lived there during various spans of her residency.