Important Notice

Landscapes are as integral a part of F N Souza’s oeuvre as his figurative works. He and his contemporaries, such as S H Raza, Akbar Padamsee, and K H Ara, continually experimented with the genre, each evolving a distinctive artistic language. In a 1989 article published in The Times of India, Souza remarked, “We can now look back and be surprised at how those of us from the Progressive Artists’ Group, Raza, Gade and myself, completely... Landscapes are as integral a part of F N Souza’s oeuvre as his figurative works. He and his contemporaries, such as S H Raza, Akbar Padamsee, and K H Ara, continually experimented with the genre, each evolving a distinctive artistic language. In a 1989 article published in The Times of India, Souza remarked, “We can now look back and be surprised at how those of us from the Progressive Artists’ Group, Raza, Gade and myself, completely broke away from the wishy-washy 19th century English watercolourists, an influence which prevailed in Bombay even in the 1940s, and came into our own individual styles. Our landscapes were not only very different from those of British painters like Turner and Constable but from the French impressionists too, although we were also modern. We were bold and full of fire. Our landscapes were full of brilliant colours!” (F N Souza, “Red Trees, Black Skies,” The Times of India, 4 June 1989)

Souza’s landscapes are rarely situated in a particular time or geographical location. Rather, they’re an amalgamation of imagery from his formative years and the many places he travelled to or called home. Art critic Edwin Mullins aptly notes, he is a “painter of the mind rather than of the eye”. The artist often worked from photographs and, in his words, his paintings “are mostly collective images of the many places I’ve known all rolled into one. Bits of Bombay, a street in Barcelona, a tree in Rome.” (Mervyn Levy, “F N Souza: The Human and the Divine,” Studio, April 1964, p. 135)

Souza was born in 1924 in the then Portuguese colony of Goa. After establishing himself as an artist in London by the mid-1950s, he continued to acknowledge his debt to his birthplace, crediting the icons and stained-glass of its churches and its natural splendour for his first lessons on figuration and colour. In his autobiography, Words and Lines, he writes fondly of the state describing it as “a beautiful country, full of rice fields and palm trees; whitewashed churches with lofty steeples; small houses with imbricated tiles, painted in a variety of colours. Glimpses of the blue sea. Red roads curving over hills and straight across paddy fields. Rich green foliage, mango trees, flowers, birds, serpents, frogs, scores of butterflies and a thousand kinds of insects.” (F N Souza, Words and Lines, London: Villiers Publications Ltd., 1959, p. 9)

“It’s all very well to talk in metaphors about having roots in one’s own country. But roots need water from clouds forming over distant seas; and from rivers having sources in different lands.”
- F N SOUZA

The artist’s incipient landscapes of the 1940s portray Goa in delicate watercolours, a marked contrast to his turbulent later works. After his move to London in 1949, these works eventually grew into enigmatic cityscapes though, in the words of art historian Yashodhara Dalmia, they were unsentimental and assumed an “apocalyptic vision”. Souza’s canvases grew more desolate and gestural, reflecting his own personal sense of dislocation and struggle with poverty as he attempted to find success in London’s art scene, as well as the existentialism of post-War Europe.

The present lot was painted in 1968, a year after Souza left London for New York where he spent most of the remainder of his life. He travelled frequently while in America, including to California and the Bahamas. Its Expressionist quality and brighter colour palette, in comparison to his earlier works, foreshadows the rare handful of vibrant landscapes he would go on to produce in the early 1970s.

The composition is marked by deft brushstrokes that instil movement and harmonise the tension between force and restraint. Like his works painted in London, the buildings in the background are depicted as tumbling geometric blocks, symbolic of things falling apart. However, they are not delineated with the thick line of his earlier pieces, but instead a thin, strong one. The spiky barren trees often seen in Souza’s landscapes are replaced by verdant palms of the Caribbean though they equally evoke the Goan landscape.

“While disregarding the limits of the picture plane, roads break off into the endless sky and trees appear always in the foreground as colourful ‘blurs’ (a device Souza uses to create perspective).” (Anthony Ludwig, Souza, New Delhi: Dhoomimal Gallery, 1989) Though the swaying foliage alludes to the wrath of nature, the linework imbues a certain lyrical quality that alleviates some of the agitation of the canvas. Souza’s “paintings are really drawn in paint, the line predominating over all other elements and serving to outline, encase and define an image; serving also to provide tonal variations (through the same technique of cross-hatching as in drawings) and to give the painting a structural and surface unity.” (Geeta Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza,” Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1978, p. 34) Well- structured and imaginative, this work is a vital testament to the artist’s prowess as both a painter and a master draughtsman.

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