The present lot is a rare work by F N Souza, made during a brief period in the 1940s, when he worked mostly on paper, producing lyrical watercolours and gouaches that depicted village life, paddy fields, farmers, fishermen, and the lush landscape of his native Goa. The artist was born in 1924 in the village of Saligao in Goa, which he later recalled fondly in his autobiography as “a beautiful country, full of rice fields and palm trees;... The present lot is a rare work by F N Souza, made during a brief period in the 1940s, when he worked mostly on paper, producing lyrical watercolours and gouaches that depicted village life, paddy fields, farmers, fishermen, and the lush landscape of his native Goa. The artist was born in 1924 in the village of Saligao in Goa, which he later recalled fondly in his autobiography 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. Morning is announced by the cock crowing: the approaching night by Angelus bells.” (F N Souza, “A Fragment of Autobiography”, Words & Lines, London: Villers Publications Ltd., 1959, p. 9)

Souza’s father Newton died shortly after his birth, leaving his mother Lilia Maria struggling to make ends meet. Seeking a better life for herself and her son, she decided to move to Bombay though she briefly sent Souza back to Goa to recover from a case of smallpox, which was often fatal at the time. After his miraculous recovery, he enrolled at St Francis Xavier’s College in Bombay where the bustle of the city “with its rattling trams, omnibuses, hacks, railways, its forest of telegraph poles and tangle of telephone wires…” stood in stark contrast to the idyll of village life that he had known in Goa. It is perhaps nostalgia for a slower life, even as he enjoyed the creative energy that Bombay offered, which prompted 16-year-old Souza to paint this work in 1940, the same year that he joined the J J School of Art.

While he found lessons in drawing, anatomy, and still life useful, Souza soon grew frustrated with the staid, outdated academic realism enforced under colonial rule. His imagination was instead fired by new ideas and movements outside of the confines of his formal training. The politically fraught years preceding Indian Independence, marked by events such as the launch of the Quit India Movement in 1942, and the Bengal Famine and Indian Naval Mutiny in 1943, influenced Souza to join the mass protests campaigning for British withdrawal from India. He viewed the presence of the institution’s British principal Charles Gerrard as emblematic of colonial dominance and was subsequently expelled for his political activism before being able to qualify for his diploma. He returned to his native Goa where he resumed painting rural landscapes and scenes from peasant life with renewed vigour, writing of the four months that he spent “happy as a barbarian in this little village. I patted the earth and thanked heaven that there was at least a small plot of land left on this planet which had not been poisoned by that ghastly civilisation...” (F N Souza, “Nirvana of a Maggot”, Words & Lines, London: Villers Publications Ltd., 1959, p. 16)

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