"Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision. His paintings are neither primitive nor `cultured`. They either move you by their stark interpretation of the visual world, or they repel you....He is an image-maker and not an aesthete or a theorist. These are earth paintings, and their impact lies in the artist`s power to distort and strengthen the eye`s image of this world, and to produce an effect almost shocking in its intensity....Souza`s treatment of the figurative image is richly varied. Besides the violence, the eroticism and the satire, there is a religious quality about his work which is medieval in its simplicity and in its unsophisticated sense of wonder"

– Edwin Mullins , Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd, 1962, pp.33, 40

Created with Souza’s characteristic impasto and aggressive black line inspired by the work of Rouault, Sutherland and Soutine, this dignified portrait of a priest or nobleman draws from religious iconography and the work of Renaissance and Romanesque painters. Also influenced by Cubism and works like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Souza has bestowed the figure in this work with almost-sculptural qualities, using light and shadow skilfully to project it beyond its two-dimensional surface and heighten the impact it has on the viewer.

"Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision. His paintings are neither primitive nor `cultured`. They either move you by their stark interpretation of the visual world, or they repel you....He is an image-maker and not an aesthete or a theorist. These are earth paintings, and their impact lies in the artist`s power to distort and strengthen the eye`s image of this world, and to produce an effect almost sh