Francis Newton Souza

Acquired in the United Kingdom circa 1960s 

‘A landscape is often an ordered optical space, but for Souza, it is bestowed with unparalleled movement.'

(T. Kumar Jain, Souza: A Legend in Modern Art: The London Years (1949 – 1967), Kumar Gallery (P) Ltd., New Delhi, 2024, p. 150)

2024 marks Francis Newton Souza’s centenary year. Born in Goa in 1924, the artist made his home across the globe, moving from Bombay to London in 1949, settling in New York in 1967, and later returning to India shortly before his death in 2002. Across the sixty years of his career, Souza changed the face of Modern Indian art, instigating the founding of the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947 and in the decades that followed, avowedly painting what he wanted, how he wanted.

Whilst most widely known for his striking portraits and Catholic imagery, Souza’s landscapes remain among some of his best and most accomplished works. Around the time of his breakthrough show at Gallery One, London in 1955, the artist painted tightly ordered, architectonic horizons, with bold outlines and compressed perspective. As the decade progressed, more tumultuous and chaotic renderings of European skylines emerged in Souza’s work. Such paintings possessed a greater sense of movement and more fluid geometrical forms, but crucially retained the compacted, stylized construction that Souza forged in his early cityscapes. The current lot, painted in 1963, dates to this dynamic phase in the artist’s production.

Executed with Souza’s quintessential gestural brushwork, the powdered blue and white sky is shown in flux, mirroring the unruly amalgam of buildings and foliage beneath. The horizon is rendered through expressively applied oils, in bright red, yellow, green and white. Such landscapes possess a chaotic tension, exquisitely grounded through the signature black outlines. Despite the apparent angst of these early townscapes, there is also an evident joy in the use of thick impasto applied liberally to the canvas or board, with layers of colour built upon one another and then merged together with swift strokes of the brush or knife.