Adham and his older brother Seif, were from a wealthy family of Turkish origin, and grew up in Alexandria, among an international cosmopolitan community with a thriving literary and artistic intellectual life. In 1935, the brothers opened their own art studio in the city with other painters and the filmmaker Mohammed Bayoumi. Wanly was well-regarded as a caricaturist and produced many character sketches for the literary magazine Rose al-Youssef and others. After traveling through Europe, he drew and painted scenes of the theatre, opera and bullfighting. In 1957, he was appointed professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Alexandria and two years later, he joined his brother in the Ministry of Culture’s program of documenting the Aswan High Dam project. Whilst visiting Upper Egypt, he began a series of sketches and paintings of the villages and archaeology that reinforced preconceptions of a division between urban and rural life. These included Qurya Nubia (“Nubian Village”), that shows the structures of a sparsely populated small village set against a hilly and mountain background. He tragically died that same year, probably before completing this project. Wanly’s style was distinguished by an emphasis on light and tone, or what the art historian Izz al-Din Najib referred to as a “musical symphony of lines and colours”. His works are found at the Seif and Adham Wanly Museum in Alexandria, as well as at other museums in Egypt, Doha and now in Sharjah.