Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002)

Throughout the 1950's and 1960's Souza produced several paintings depicting Saints, that tend to combine religious imagery and satire which Sylvester terms 'a caricature of Byzantine Icons'.  The figure in the current  work is strikingly similar to the another figure painted in the same year titled St Stephen A Homage to Stephen Spender  who was the editor of the magazine Encounter.

In 1962 Edwin Mullins compared Souza to Picasso stating, 'with his finest paintings …the concentrated passion with which they were created may seem to burn over the canvas, yet the nature of the passion is less easy to place. They are full of apparent contradictions: agony wit, pathos and satire, aggression and pity. Their impact is certain but few people are able to explain what has hit them. Like Picasso, too, his interventions have tended to be thought outrageous, because the imagination that created them was discovering something about the visual world which no one as yet understood or which everyone had forgotten.’ (Edwin Mullins, F. N. Souza, 1962, p. 37).