Important Notice

Lot 5

Souza was born in Goa, then a Portuguese colony on the western coast of India, in 1924. In his essay "A Fragment of Autobiography", first published in Words and Lines in 1959, the artist describes his native land 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 colors. Glimpses of the blue sea. Red roads curving over hills and... Souza was born in Goa, then a Portuguese colony on the western coast of India, in 1924. In his essay "A Fragment of Autobiography", first published in Words and Lines in 1959, the artist describes his native land 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 colors. 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" (Words and Lines, Nitin Bhayana Publishing, New Delhi, 2000, p. 9).

Although he did not hold a high opinion of India at the time, largely because he found his fellow countrymen to lack appreciation for any progressive modernism in the arts, Souza never lost touch with Goa. Visiting several times after establishing himself as a noted artist and writer in London in the mid 1950`s, he frequently acknowledged his debt to the place where he was born and raised, crediting the icons and stained-glass of its churches and its natural splendour for his first lessons on figuration and color.

The present lot, an early Goan landscape, reflects the quiet beauty of the region Souza described in Words and Lines. Here, a small village sits serenely on a lush hillside in the shade of three tall coconut palms. The houses on this canvas, like those of Souza`s earlier townscapes, are architectonically constructed out of geometric building blocks. However, they are not delineated with the thick, brash line of those earlier pieces, but instead a thin, strong one, foreshadowing the creative arcs and whorls of his 1961 pieces. In addition, there seems to be an element of restraint in the brushstroke of this piece, and a great deal of precision in its texturing and subtle gradations of hue.

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