By 1958, Francis Newton Souza had firmly established himself as a successful artist and writer in post-war London, with well-known galleries exhibiting his work and wealthy patrons supporting him. A few years before in Paris, the artist had met the New York hospital owner Harold Kovner, who became his first major benefactor, providing a stipend that enabled him to paint what are now considered to be some of his most significant works. After exhibiting at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and winning one of the first John Moores Painting Prizes in 1957, Souza was invited to be one of five painters to represent Great Britain at the Guggenheim International Award in 1958 with his iconic painting Birth. With this patronage, critical acclaim and recognition, the artist embarked on various trips around Europe in the late 1950s, which inspired some of his most impressive paintings.

The citadel at the heart of Spanish Landscape, painted in 1958, represents Souza’s interpretation of the complex Romanesque architecture he encountered on a trip to Spain earlier that year. Closely related to the style of the churches in the Portuguese colony of Goa, where the artist was born and raised, the roofs and steeples of the buildings in this painting recall the fortified chapels, monasteries and castles of various Spanish hill towns like the Castillo of Loarre in Huesca, the Monastery of San Salvador of Leyre in Navarra and the Church of La Vera Cruz in Segovia. Souza cleverly directs his viewer’s eye to these structures by placing them at the cynosure of the painting, where the rolling hills and sky appear to meet. Rather than cataclysmic, the manmade structures of this citadel appear quiet and brooding, corresponding to the dark hills and bare trees that surround them. Souza would return to the vistas he encountered in Spain in several landscapes he painted over the next few years, including Spain (1959), Spanish Landscape (1961), Las Ramblas Barcelona (1961) and Valldemosa (1961).

In the introduction to the catalogue of the 1959 exhibition in which this landsape was first shown, Neville Wallis noted, “If one detects in his style an amalgam of Indian, of Byzantine and Picassoesque strains, with an implacable force wholly his own, that might be shown as achieving a synthesis which is the peculiar problem of Eastern artists in Europe. But the pertinent question is just how expressive a vehicle Souza has made of his painting.” Rather than “hardening into a strait-jacket [sic] formula [...] there has been a loosening, a greater freedom in the linear organisation of his townscapes which glow still like stained glass. But in all his work one is conscious of the inexorable daemon that drives this artist, the first Indian contemporary to gain a high distinction in the West.” (N. Wallis, F.N. Souza, exhibition catalogue, London, 1959, unpaginated)