Born in Baalbek (1944–2024), Moustafa Haidar grew up surrounded by the rugged mountains of the Beqaa Valley, though he always longed for the sea. In 1958, at the age of 14, he journeyed to Beirut to enroll at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts (ALBA). Mentored by Nicolas Nammar, he studied alongside Amine El Bacha and Hassan Jouni, painting for roughly fifteen hours a day. After graduating from ALBA in 1962, Haidar worked as a caricaturist at *Al Ahad* magazine. In 1963, he was awarded the bronze medal at the Alexandria Biennale for Mediterranean Countries. He taught at the Lebanese University from 1967 to 1990, as well as in public high schools in South Lebanon. Haidar came of age in a nationalistic atmosphere that rejected colonial dependency. Inspired by his father, who spent a decade in prison due to revolutionary organizing against the French, Haidar used painting to search for truth and liberate man from self-enslavement. Haidar is known for his skill in coloring and transparency. His one-stroke rule soaks his watercolor paintings in light, and he achieved it by impulsively selecting colors and mixing only two at a time to access their infinite derivatives. His affinity for the medium earned him the moniker "Father of Watercolor." In 1975, Paul Guiragossian (1926–1993), while receiving treatment at the University of Illinois Hospital in Chicago, discovered that the hospital owned 24 of Haidar's watercolors, whose calming and vivid colors assist patients in the healing process. Working across watercolor, oil, acrylic, pastel, and Indian ink, Haidar portrayed landscapes, nude figures, and scenes of daily life in a gestural, unembellished style. His priority lay not in the details of form but in the spontaneity of his color choices and the emotional force of his compositions. Breaking his subjects down to simple forms through loose, fluid brushstrokes and sharp angles, Haidar created works that exaggerate emotion while tending toward realism, believing that truth exists in both imagination and reality.