Francis Newton Souza

Acquired in 1957 from Gallery One, London

Thence by descent 

London, Gallery One, Souza 57

Souza 57, London, Gallery One, 1957, unpaginated

There are very small nails driven into the board along the edges of the work to secure it to the frame. There are minor abrasions and losses throughout particularly around the edges of the work. This painting has been recently cleaned using a dry brush and is in good overall condition, as viewed.
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Profile is typical of the portraits the artist was producing during the 1950s. This striking painting displays Souza's characteristic monumental two-dimensional head and torso set against a background devoid of context that allows the viewer to focus solely on the subject. Souza's portraits from this period are clearly inspired by the works of Picasso and Rouault in their use of thick black outlines enclosing flat planes of colour that recall the art of Romanesque Spain. However Souza '... is a painter who has developed an imagery which is strongly his own. Perhaps for these reasons he has never yielded easily to the influene of other artists. The result is a synthesis of traditions and styles, and at the same time the evolution of an original talent which has stolen its greatest powers from no one.' (E. Mullins, Souza, 1962, p.45)

Souza's approach to his subjects stemmed from his obsession with the human condition and its relationship to sex and religion. Souza used these underlying fixations as a way to uncover and exercise formative issues from his upbringing. 'Souza's treatment of the figurative image is richly varied. Besides the violence, the eroticism and the satire, there is a religious quality about his work which is medieval in its simplicity and in its unsophisticated sense of wonder.' (E. Mullins, 1962, p. 40).

'If he was creating monsters, probably no one would be troubled; but because his images are clearly intended to be human, one is compelled to ask why his faces have eyes high up in the forehead... why he paints mouths that stretch like hair combs across the face, and limbs that branch out like thistles. Souza's imagery is not a surrealist vision... so much as a spontaneous re-creation of the world as he has seen it, distilled in the mind by a host of private experiences and associations.' (ibid, p.39).

By the time this painting was produced in 1957, Souza had began to achieve commercial success as an international artist. In 1955, Souza had his first one-man show at Gallery One in Mayfair which was a sell-out. The same year Souza's Nirvana of a Maggot, an autobiographical essay, was published by Stephen Spender in Encounter magazine. The following year Souza met Harold Kovner a wealthy New Yorker, who went on to become the artist's patron for the next four years. In 1957, Gallery One hosted Souza's third solo exhibition in which this painting was exhibited. A year after this work was painted, Souza was selected as one of five painters to represent Great Britain for the Guggenheim International Award.