Important Notice

An encounter with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1948 proved decisive for S H Raza’s artistic trajectory. Raza largely made watercolour landscapes when he met Bresson, who impressed the importance of pictorial construction upon him. He told the young artist, “There is emotion and colour in your works but they lack construction. You should know that a painting is constructed like a building with a base, a foundation, walls, seams, roofs... An encounter with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1948 proved decisive for S H Raza’s artistic trajectory. Raza largely made watercolour landscapes when he met Bresson, who impressed the importance of pictorial construction upon him. He told the young artist, “There is emotion and colour in your works but they lack construction. You should know that a painting is constructed like a building with a base, a foundation, walls, seams, roofs and only then it stands. I will advise you to study Cézanne.” (Bresson as quoted in Ashok Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 40)

Raza moved to France a few years later in 1950 for this very reason. There he immersed himself in studying the European masters. He became a habitual visitor to museums like the Musée Guimet, the Louvre, and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris among others where he encountered the works of Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, and Paul Gauguin. From them he internalised the importance of construction. “Happily, next to Van Gogh were paintings by Cézanne which restored me to tranquility with their straight lines, built architecturally, with colour orchestration. I realised that this was the construction about which Henri Cartier-Bresson had spoken to me.” (The artist quoted in Geeti Sen, “La Forge: The Furnace”, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Limited, 1997, p. 54)

“For many years, my main theme was the French landscape wherein trees and mountains, villages and churches, became important motifs. They served as a pretext to construct; the aim was to ‘build a picture’.” - S H RAZA

Raza’s travels around his adopted country gave him a deep affection for the French countryside. It became his favourite subject in the decade of the 1950s, when he honed his pictorial construction through richly hued landscapes, such as the present lot. Michel Imbert has noted, “The hills, the trees, the houses and churches served him as a kind of pretext for his compositions, for constructing his canvases, in which his starting point is always the subject that he then exceeds by organizing the arrangement of shapes and colours.” (Michael Imbert, “Others on Raza,” Ashok Vajpeyi ed., Sayed Haider Raza, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing in association with The Raza Foundation, 2023, p. 124)

Raza painted this work in 1956, a year which proved to be a turning point in career. He garnered international attention as the first non-French artist to win the prestigious Prix de la Critique. It was also around this time that he began experimenting with form. The highly structured compositions of his earlier landscapes gradually began to give way to a more instinctive arrangement. This is exemplary of the transitional works like the present lot where colour gains precedence over line, foretelling his impending move to gestural abstraction which would come to define the next phase of his career the following decade.

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