1955 was a critical year for Souza, with many milestones achieved and with his creativity at its peak. It was during this year Souza wrote his innovative autobiographical essay, ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’, published by his friend, the poet Stephen Spender in Encounter magazine and painted his most iconic works including Birth, which holds the world auction record for the artist. It was also the year of Souza’s first solo exhibition at Victor Musgrave’s prestigious Gallery One in London. This landmark exhibition drew praise from John Berger, the renowned art critic, who devoted a whole article to it in the New Statesman. Other well-known critics Andrew Forge and George Butcher wrote articles on the artist that appeared in publications such as The Guardian and the London Times. 1955 was perhaps the most significant and productive year in Souza’s career, marking the landmark moment that Souza established himself in the eyes of the critics, patrons and galleries of the London art world.

In this finely detailed landscape from 1955, Souza depicts the North London neighborhood around Belsize Park and Hampstead Heath where he lived and worked at the time. These urban environs were a muse for the artist during this productive period of his career, and track the evolution of his landscape paintings from the bold architectonic forms of the 1950s with their thick, black outlines to the more gestural and fluid compositions of the early 1960s. Here, Souza captures a simultaneously bright and austere scene, using pale pastel colors to depict what is most likely the view from his studio on a crisp winter morning. With a combination of meticulous lines and crosshatches, Souza foregrounds a single barren tree in this scene, and a few bare branches just visible at its lower edge. Behind them, an almost white sun illuminates a stylized Victorian building in a large courtyard, recalling the Catholic architecture that informed so many of Souza’s landscapes in the 1950s.

Writing about Souza’s urban landscapes, fellow artist Jagdish Swaminathan noted, “Souza’s cityscapes are the congealed visions of a mysterious world. Whether standing solidly in enamelled petrification or delineated in thin colour with calligraphic intonations, the cityscapes of Souza are purely plastic entities with no reference to memories or mirrors.” (J. Swaminathan, ‘Souza's Exhibition’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, March 1995, p. 31)