Before there was a Bahraini art scene to speak of, there was a boy in Muharraq with a pencil and a box of watercolours. What survives from those first years is a fraction of what he made: the works gathered here, dating to 1969 and earlier, are the earliest to have come down to the family, and they are studies rather than statements. The alleys and courtyards of the old town, its boats, its markets, its people at rest and at work, set down in the plain, attentive hand of someone teaching himself to see.

Nasser AlYousif had no formal training when he began. What these drawings show instead is a native instinct for composition and a devotion to place that would outlast every later shift in his practice. Muharraq, rendered here as a child's daily world, would return throughout his career, transformed by memory into the folk subjects of the 1970s oils and, decades later, into the linoleum prints of his final years.