Important Notice

F N Souza moved from his native village of Saligao in Goa to Bombay as a teenager with his widowed mother, Lilia Maria Antunes. His rebellious temperament led to his expulsion from St Xavier’s, the Jesuit school he attended, inadvertently freeing him from a path toward priesthood. Instead, he enrolled at the J J School of Art in 1940, where he excelled academically despite his contempt for a curriculum modelled the Royal Academy and rooted in... F N Souza moved from his native village of Saligao in Goa to Bombay as a teenager with his widowed mother, Lilia Maria Antunes. His rebellious temperament led to his expulsion from St Xavier’s, the Jesuit school he attended, inadvertently freeing him from a path toward priesthood. Instead, he enrolled at the J J School of Art in 1940, where he excelled academically despite his contempt for a curriculum modelled the Royal Academy and rooted in outdated academic realism.

Souza was not immune to the charged political climate of the 1940s as India rallied to bring British colonial rule to an end. While in art school, he became actively involved in leftist politics and joined the Communist Party in 1947. Works from this decade, including the present lot, reflect his socialist convictions and frequently depict the lives of the impoverished proletariat. Critic Geeta Kapur explains, “Being by temperament a fighter every pang of humiliation he felt as an individual or as a “native” roused him to retaliation and attack. He converted this fighting spirit into revolutionary politics... He devised his figures according to class-types, showed them in their environment, labelled them with appropriate titles. He depicted the plight of the poor (Goan peasants, Bombay proletariat); he exposed the villains (capitalists in particular, the bourgeoisie in general). He painted, moreover, in an idiom belonging broadly to the Social Realist category and was more than willing, with the help of the party organisation, to show his paintings in the working class colonies of Bombay.” (Geeta Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza: The Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd.,1978, p. 7).

Executed when Souza was just twenty, this work demonstrates his early natural talent through its strong forms and composition. He uses saturated blocks of colour bordered by heavy black contours that later became central to his style. These elements were influenced by Primitive art, the paintings of Georges Rouault, and the ubiquitous stained-glass windows of Goan churches. His warm palette of browns and reds evokes the peasants’ close relationship with the soil and transports the viewer from the congested urban landscape of Bombay “with its rattling trams, omnibuses, hacks, railways, its forest of telegraph poles and tangle of telephone wires…” to the pastoral Goan villages of his childhood, “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, “A Fragment of Autobiography”, Words & Lines, London: Villers Publications Ltd., 1959, p. 9)

The present lot is also of distinguished provenance, having formed part of the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection. The couple first travelled to India in 1961 and developed close relationships with several leading artists, including M F Husain and Ram Kumar, over many subsequent visits. Comprising around 3,000 works, the Herwitz Collection is among the largest and most comprehensive holdings documenting the development of modern and contemporary Indian art. Works from the collection have been exhibited at the Tate Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, the Centre Pompidou, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Worcester Art Museum, with many gifted to the Peabody Essex Museum in 2001.

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