Important Notice

F N Souza's paintings produced during the 1940s are characterised by a revolutionary spirit fuelled by the artist???s involvement with the Indian national struggle for independence. Having been expelled from the J J School of Art in 1945, Souza???s politics led him to Marxism and eventually joining the Communist Party in 1947. Edwin Mullins describes the period, noting that Souza was ???increasingly vexed by the polite inertia of Bombay... F N Souza's paintings produced during the 1940s are characterised by a revolutionary spirit fuelled by the artist???s involvement with the Indian national struggle for independence. Having been expelled from the J J School of Art in 1945, Souza???s politics led him to Marxism and eventually joining the Communist Party in 1947. Edwin Mullins describes the period, noting that Souza was ???increasingly vexed by the polite inertia of Bombay society, with its borrowed aesthetic values of India and its indifference to the condition of India...??? (Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond, 1962, p.17. In Peasants in Goa, painted in 1947, he highlights the plight of the toiling common man. Before he left for England in 1949, Souza painted several scenes of Goan life, many of which display visual similarities with the Primitivism that was popular with Western artists such as Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso. However, paintings such as the present lot are by no means derivative, but rather display the anti-establishment sentiment that led to the founding of the Progressive Artists??? Group by the artist in 1947.

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