Francis Newton Souza

This work is framed behind glass and is in good condition, as viewed.
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In 1949, Francis Newton Souza moved to London, and was distressed by the grim reality of post-war Britain. Confronted with an impoverished city desperate to regain a sense of identity and cohesion after the war, his early townscapes characterise this angst. This mood permeated the works of a number of other British based artists of the time, such as Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland.

In Landscape, produced in 1954, Souza has developed a relief-like texture by first sketching the buildings, adding a layer of white paint and then incising into the surface. Windows of different sizes overlap each other, walls are barely distinguishable below the thick cross hatching and at times the skyline merges with rooftops through bold lines rendered into the paint. The trees that line the street are at once bare and fruitful; leaves have been substituted by thorny spikes yet large succulent buds appear from the tops of the branches. This paper work is full of vitality, amplified by the immediacy of this medium. Executed with speed and confidence, Souza ably demonstrates his superior draftsmanship skills. While 'His early cityscapes follow a rectilinear structure, [they] later in the 1960s give way to an apocalyptic vision. The tumbling houses in their frenzied movement are also symbolic of all things falling apart, of the very root of things being shaken.' (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi, 2001, p. 93).