Important Notice

Painted in 1992, the present lot illustrates how integral landscapes remained to F N Souza’s oeuvre. Over the course of his career, his treatment of the genre evolved in both structure and complexity, from lyrical watercolour paintings of Goan scenery he produced in the 1940s into striking and often tumultuous interpretations of European-and later American-landscapes and cityscapes for which he gained considerable acclaim during the 1950s and... Painted in 1992, the present lot illustrates how integral landscapes remained to F N Souza’s oeuvre. Over the course of his career, his treatment of the genre evolved in both structure and complexity, from lyrical watercolour paintings of Goan scenery he produced in the 1940s into striking and often tumultuous interpretations of European-and later American-landscapes and cityscapes for which he gained considerable acclaim during the 1950s and 1960s. Fellow artist Jagdish Swaminathan described him as a “painter of cityscapes and religious themes. While in the latter he is loaded with a troubled presentiment, in the former he is singularly devoid of emotive inhibitions [...] Souza’s cityscapes are the congealed visions of a mysterious world.” (Jagdish Swaminathan, “Souza’s Exhibition”, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, March 1995, p. 31)

The work bears the hallmarks of Souza’s signature style, emphasising the strength of his artistic vision even in his later years. Using a compressed perspective and his iconic thick black outline, he constructs a bold cityscape from a cluster of stacked cubic forms wedged together amidst rolling hills. As he once remarked, “The outline is the scaffolding on which you hang your painting. It is the structure without which art cannot exist and becomes wishy washy... Within the structure you add paint and paint and structure are one and the same.” (Artist quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Underbelly of Existence”, The Demonic Line - F N Souza An Exhibition of Drawings, 1940 - 1964, New Delhi: DAG, 2000, p. 3)

The scene loosely recalls the landscape and architecture of Hampstead Heath, the affluent North London suburb near where he lived for nearly two decades before moving to New York in 1967. Yet Souza’s landscapes are rarely ever faithful to a single location. He was a “painter of the mind and rather than of the eye” who drew on memory and imagination to evoke, rather than replicate, a sense of place. (Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd., 1962, p. 33) While the corniced buildings may echo the architecture of Hampstead, they also suggest the Catholic churches of Goa, where Souza was born. The rich reds, blues, and greens recall the luminosity of stained glass, pointing to its lasting influence on his visual language. Elaborating on his artistic approach Souza has explained, “I work a lot from photographs... I often paint my landscapes from photographs. Or rather I begin to paint them from photographs. In the end they are mostly collective images of many places I’ve known all rolled into one. Bits of Bombay, a street in Barcelona, a tree in Rome. And I often introduce into my composite landscapes the livid green of the monsoons of Goa.” (Artist quoted in Mervyn Levy, “F N Souza the Human and the Divine,” G S Whittet ed., Studio Vol 167 No 852, April 1964, pp. 135 - 36)

“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

In Souza’s view, nature was “the sole principle”-a governing force surpassing both man and religion. (F N Souza, “Foreword”, Words & Lines, New Delhi: Nitin Bhayana Publishing) Here he illustrates the inherent tension between the natural world and the built environment through swift, diagonal brushstrokes that animate the sky and land, and by contrasting the rigid, rectilinear geometry of the architecture with the undulating contours of the surrounding terrain. Commenting on Souza’s capacity to bring a fresh and original perspective to a long-standing pictorial genre, critic Anthony Ludwig writes, “The landscapes, architectonic with their ‘cubic factors’ are ultimately lyrical. There’s an unrestrained enthusiasm, a liberty in the application of color that is applied swiftly with a palette knife, creating smooth pulsating textures. 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). Our emotions are guided by the effects of the vibrant color schemes that belong to a world of subconscious fantasy indicative of the fertility of Souza’s personal vision.” (Anthony Ludwig, Souza, New Delhi: Dhoomimal Gallery)

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