Acquired directly from the artist at Obelisk Gallery, London, circa 1958-59

Thence by descent

Good overall condition. Could benefit from a light cleaning.
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Untitled (The Prophet) is a striking painting that incorporates Francis Newton 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. One of the greatest strengths of Souza's work is that he remained tirelessly experimental.  The bold complex heads of the 1950s created with thick cross hatching become further distorted to result in complex mutated forms. One can surmise that Souza's portraits from this period are inspired by the works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Rouault in their use of thick black outlines enclosing flat planes of colour that recall the art of Romanesque Spain.

Mullins has aptly commented, ‘Souza has given to art a great deal more than he has taken from it. His painting is intensely personal, to the point of being esoteric. To appreciate it, one has to participate in certain preoccupations and fears which make his visual distortions explicable and sympathetic. This is a gesture which the spectator has to be prepared to make with all ‘expressionist’ art, from Grunewald and Bosch to Munch and Kokoschka. And Souza’s distortions lend themselves to rational explanation no more than do those of Bosch and Kokoschka. 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, or else scattered in profusion all over the face; 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 – a self-conscious aesthetic shock – so much as a spontaneous re-creation of the world as he has seen it.’ (E. Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Publishers, London, 1962, pp.🐬 38-39) This painting contains many of the elements mentioned by Mullins including the high placement of the subject’s eyes and a mouth that spans across his face. It is interesting that🌊 Mullins has deduced that these disproportionate traits are symptomatic of Souza’s view of the people and objects that surround him.

By the time this work was produced in 1958, Souza had already begun to achieve commercial success as an international artist. In 1955, he had his first one-man show at Gallery One in Mayfair which was a sell-out and Souza's Nirvana of a Maggot, an autobiographical essay, wa𒊎s published by Stephen Spender in Encounter magazine. The following year, he met Harold Kovner, a wealthy New Yorker, who went on to become the artist's patron for the next four years. The year this work was painted, Souza was also selected as one of five painters to represent Great Britain for the Guggenheim International Award.