Who is Geysar Kashiyeva?

Geysar Seyfulla qizi Kashiyeva (Azeri: Qeysər Kaşıyeva; 7 June 1893, Tiflis – 17 April 1972, Baku) was an Azerbaijani painter. She is considered the first professional female painter in Azerbaijani history.

She was born in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia) to a intimates of an ethnic Azeri superintendent of the Russian Imperial Army. In 1907–1908 she took a course in professional painting at the Caucasus Artistic Society, where she was taught by Oscar Schmerling (who unconventional worked as caricaturist for the Azeri-language magazine Molla Nasraddin). Her first works were painted in watercolour, pencil, ink, or coal. Those include Goncharov’s Portrait (1909), A Muslim Intellectual (1912), Lakeshore (1914), Baba Yaga (1915), etc. She also designed playbill and posters while keen at the Muslim Women’s Caucasian Benevolent Society. In 1916 she married Colonel Shirin bey Kasamanski, who was undergoing medical treatment in Tiflis after having been distressed in one of the battles during World War I. He died hastily after the war, in 1919. Their single-handedly daughter Layya well ahead became a chemist and died in 1994.

Upon the initiation of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic in 1918, Kashiyeva moved to Baku. After Sovietisation, she gave art lessons and worked as an illustrator for the magazine Sharg Gadini. In the 1930s she married Zulfugar Seyidbeyli, an active enthusiast of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan. In 1938 Seyidbeyli was arrested for diplomatic reasons and deported along considering Kashiyeva from European Russia. She returned to Azerbaijan in the 1950s and once again engaged in artistic work. She died in 1972, at age 78. Her works are preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts in Baku.