Khayachi’s ideas on art. His copious study on Titian allows absolutely nothing of himself and his own ideas to surface. In typical self-effacing style, he never commits himself to a personal judgement. His work is a purely objective academic study. Having forged his personality in the silence of the artist’s studio, he identified with Titian and saw him as an alter ego, so that he talks about Titian as he might of himself: ‘Titian was an orderly man who settled his life with imperturbable coolness.’

 Like Titian, Khayachi would work on several paintings at the same time, and commented: ‘Titian seems to have been used to working on a large number of pictures simultaneously and only finished them very slowly, sometimes leaving long periods between the successive stages of work done on them to bring them to perfection…Never was such power in setting the scene, never such unity in action.’ Like Titian, Noureddine Khayachi discovered the golden rule of where a picture’s centre of gravity fell, how to place shapes and colours most tellingly: ‘The palette becomes richer, more varied, and more sparkling as it meets the voluptuous music of delicate, seductive colours…Art consists of finding a harmony by the expressive arrangement of shadows and brilliance.’

His palette shimmered with a thousand pinpoints of light, multi-coloured stars. He knew he was in control; he would overcome the silence: ‘What is vital  is the science with which the warm, abundant light is shed on the earth and in the sky to give shapes their full depth and colours their full intensity.’

Khayachi’s work was successful, both in terms of quality and of quantity, because of the hard work he put in, on the canvas and on himself.

His social position meant that worldly success was his for the asking; he could have spent his time at evening parties and receptions, travelling round, throwing parties… But he wanted none of this. In his behaviour and his life, as in so many ways, he emulated his hero, Titian: ‘One imagines that such an exceptional situation gave Titian exceptional privileges. He does not seem to have changed either his way of life or his behaviour. A hard worker above everything else, of independent character, fond of his creature comforts, he had no desire for showy living or extensive travel which would interrupt his work, affect his health and disturb his habits.’

What process of identification drove him in the 1960s to start writing a thesis on Titian? It was a courageous, judicious, surprising choice and Khayachi triumphed over every historical and geographical obstacle, fiercely determined to learn, know and love.

He invested so much of himself in the study of Titian’s life and work that his passion and conscientiousness made him forget himself, forget that he was the author of the work. He wrote in a neutral, objective tone, never using the word ‘I’, never saying ‘I think that’, ‘I consider that’, ‘I suppose that’. He removed himself completely from the discourse, leaving the centre stage for Titian.

Like Titian, Khayachi painted very slowly. Titian painted his later works in stages, laying in the main forms and then turning the pictures to the wall, adding, altering or revising over many months. It was with Titian that painting was brought out of the churches and into the studios, that painters signed their canvases, that painting was recognised as a work of art, and that artists’ studios were transformed into commercial enterprises, where rich merchants vied with one another (courteously) to buy the pictures.

Titian played this important historical role. And in the same way, Hédi and Noureddine Khayachi may be seen as the begetters and sires of Tunisian easel painting.

As a painter of portraits, Noureddine Khayachi could have found no better teacher (after his father) than Titian. So he went off to Rome to study the life and work of the artist who had had such a profound influence on later painters and sparked off the extraordinary evolution of portraiture.

In the Most Serene Republic of Venice, Titian gradually became a veritable specialist in psychological portraiture. He knew that it was impossible to paint a king and a beggar, a child and an old man, a naked woman and a down-and-out in the same way. He knew that human beings cannot be handled identically, that each person has his own particular truth, that personalities are important, not features alone. Painting enabled the artist to depict the ultimate truth of the sitter through his artistic skill. That is how Titian worked, in 1505 in Venice, and how Khayachi worked, in 1960 in La Marsa.

Official portraits, family portraits, portraits of friends, and portraits of unknown people and of nudes were handled with the same passion by Titian and Khayachi.

Titian had as clients the Emperor Charles V, Philip II of Spain, Popes and bishops, and the d’Este and Farnese families, Khayachi the Tunisian State, the Royal Court of Saudi Arabia and the leading families of Tunis. Both captured at one and the same time the physical appearance of the sitter and the concept of his role and status.

Khayachi, like Titian, was extremely conscious of the political aspect of his pictorial task when painting a sovereign. Confronted with kings and princes, the artist must exploit clothing, decoration, the signs and emblems of power, a majestic pose, a prestigious decor, the symbols of wealth, luxurious furnishings and an excellent composition to set off the sitter and exalt and enhance his power.

Art in the service of power has to show through the power of painting the omnipotence of that power and its material and spiritual influence. Titian and Khayachi both mastered the art of portraiture to sing the praises of the men in power and to give portraiture an historical as well as a social function. Khayachi’s first teacher was his father, who had been the official artist to the Beys of Tunis; he then turned to Titian, his second teacher, the most renowned portraitist of Italian painting, the man who made up the rules, invented the statutes, established the canons and defined the aesthetics of art. When one’s sovereign sits for his portrait, one must be inspired, one must outdo one’s own self. Although 400 years separated them, both Titian and Khayachi understood that even if one considers people with the same human passion, there must be a difference in the way they are depicted. Every person has his own truth, and this truth cannot be told in the same way. Every person has his position, his degree of influence, his own need, his luminous side, his dark side and his presence. Both Titian and Khayachi, each in his own time and circle, participated in the creation of an ‘official’ art.

Khayachi had another point in common with Titian, the seriousness with which he took his work. Titian lived to an extreme old age, and was contemporaneous with both earlier artists (Giorgione and Bellini) and later ones (Tintoretto, Veronese and El Greco).  This life was organised like clockwork, and nothing counted but his work. Khayachi, too, had but one passion.

Like Titian, Khayachi was gentle and peaceful, an exemplary husband and an affectionate father. Their passion for painting did not draw the men into the pursuit of liaisons; their delirium was confined to the canvas. Privately and publicly, they were models of balance, elegance, probity, self-command, chastity and modesty. Their cult of work did not permit misbehaviour. Art was an exclusive passion that left no room for other passions. They sublimated those adventures of the flesh and those delights of love that they might have experienced in their work.

They found in their studios the weight of the human condition. Like Titian, Khayachi loved to dress and undress women, to discover in their voluptuous curves a beauty which drove people not to perversion but to purity and perfection. Art, trying to discover personal truth, became a voyage to the heart of the human geography.

His careful attention to Titian’s work taught Khayachi many things: the strength of colour, the harmony of values, the subtlety of tones, the richness of composition, the love of portraiture, the exaltation of women, the sublimation of power, respect for the state, love of life, the work ethic and precise draughtsmanship. But he turned away from Titian’s insistence on light, preferring the sombre tones of Giorgione and Bellini. Why does he never give us a blue sky? Was it because of the long hours spent in shadowy museums, and in the churches and temples of Italy, where paintings loomed out of the gloom? Perhaps this explains his concentration on the constant struggle between light and dark.

Khayachi drew brilliantly and understood that correct drawing opens the way to the mysteries of painting: ‘You must feel in drawing an attention to precision and in painting a felicitous combination of colours.’ Drawing is the handmaid of painting, the other side of the canvas.

Khayachi drew like Michelangelo and painted like Titian. He knew he was talented, and wanted to protect his work in the shelter of museums.

‘In painting, you often have to allow for the ardent lyricism of a beautiful day sparkling with life, love and beauty.’ This is how Khayachi addressed the problem of fervour in art, a fervour that surprises in a man so modest and reserved.

A gentle, peaceful man, a father who loved his home, a model husband and a moderate man whom no passion could sway, he amazes us when he speaks of being drunk with love and aesthetic delirium: ‘a touch of the lively, flexible brush, manifestation of the bloom of youth, retains within these exquisite limits an unforgettable charm of poetry and freshness.’ It is indeed Noureddine Khayachi speaking, pleading the cause of hedonism, when he had seemed to be armed against the creative madness. In his public and private life he was a model of sobriety, elegance, probity and self-control. He subjected himself to a fierce work routine that ruled out any untoward conduct. Even his brushwork, gradually, carefully, incrementally building up the picture, prevented his being a high and wild liver, a bohemian. For him, painting was inextricably linked with morality and ethics, and the act of painting with personal virtue.

Yet despite this moral asceticism, Khayachi was not a cold-hearted man but one filled with love and tenderness. Take the considerable number of nudes whose sensuality shines out from his canvases. ‘Looking at her, our eyes are as if drunken. They follow the line that charts the form of her miraculous body…Once let this line, with its swellings and withdrawals, its surgings and its slackenings, become alive in us and we feel ourselves taken over by a sense of profound delight…What grace, what vigour…How this young body lives, quivers, shivers, sings and vibrates! This is woman at the height of her power. She is young and we can guess that she possesses a formidable force. She seems peaceful and serene, but at heart she is a tiger at rest.’ Khayachi fuses with his models to become the line that expresses the voluptuousness of such a communion. His nudes are remarkable for their elegance and beauty. Admiring his drawings one wants to compliment him in the same terms as he praised Titian’s work: ‘The emotion is irresistible. Never have naked beauty and adorned beauty been presented together with such seductive charm. Everything speaks of love – the nymphs, the shepherds, the hunters, the flight of the butterflies, the bouquet of roses, the luminous tranquillity, the horses – all true painting is poetry.’

With every woman he drew, Khayachi worked as if he was creating the world anew, as if Eve had sprung from his pencil. However we read Khayachi’s work we have to agree that he was a first-rate Tunisian painter, and, as he himself said in his notes on Titian, ‘if one does not know how to understand a work of art, one does at least know how to admire it.’