Frederick Noronha
Goa remains surprisingly (and largely) unaware of its achievers in the world of art. In recent years, online resources have helped to reduce this lack of awareness—if not always the lack of interest too—but the picture remains incomplete. We still depend largely on occasional mentions in print and scattered references on social media to remind us that, despite its small size, Goa has produced a remarkable number of artists and art-world achievers whose work and reputations have extended far beyond the region.
Visual artists from here have made their dent across the globe. F.N. Souza (linked to Saligão and Assolna) is arguably the biggest global name. He was the founder of the Progressive Artists’ Group and later active in London and New York. His works started selling for millions, largely after his death.
Vasudeo S. Gaitonde is considered one of India’s greatest abstract painters, whose work entered major international collections and whose Guggenheim retrospective was a landmark. Laxman Pai (Margão) trained and exhibited in Paris and is believed to have held more than 110 solo exhibitions across five continents.
Vamona Navelcar’s (of Pomburpa) career spanned Goa, Portugal and Mozambique. Angelo da Fonseca is credited with building an “Indian visual language for Christian themes”. Fonseca (1902–1967), Calcutta-born to Goan parents and a student of Sir JJ School besides Santiniketan, is credited with creating a distinctive Indian visual language for Christian subjects.
Lancelot Ribeiro, the London-based modernist of Goan origin and half brother of FN Souza; Mario Miranda, famous for his cartoons and illustrations; Subodh Kerkar, whose works have been widely exhibited across the globe; among others, are closer to our times.
Getting an entire book devoted to a single artist might be rare, but António Xavier Trindade: An artist from Goa (1870–1935) is the large-size, fully-illustrated tome devoted to the work and life of the Sanguem-born, Assonora-linked artist who gained his name, fame and stature in the city then known as Bombay.
(His daughter Ângela Trindade, 1909–1980, though not the subject of this work, has also been noticed significantly. She is also credited with combining Goan heritage, Indian modernism, international exposure and the pioneering role of a professional woman artist. Ângela is believed to be one of the first women in India to make painting a profession. She explored Tantric art, Abstract Expressionism, and developed her own distinctive Trindadism.)
Thanks to online sources (including Wikipedia), one can easily dig out information on Trindade now. There are even images of his copyright-expired artwork there.
To get an idea of the artist’s significance, one comment perhaps stands out over all others. Trinidade was called the “Rembrandt of the East” by art critics in his time. Today, online spaces remember him as “a master portraitist from Goa”. His paintings, as theheritagelab.in puts it, “are famous for depicting the free-spirited, and uninhibited women of India in the 19th-20th century”.
More to the point, the work of this artist have also been exhibited permanently at the Fundação Oriente in Panjim itself, giving one less excuse for not being acquainted with the same.
This book from the Fundação Oriente is a detailed introduction to the author’s work, with sufficient text on the author and his life too. The latter part is dealt with in the first 15 pages of the text, after which it moves on to cataloguing the paintings and sketches of Trinidade.
This book is filled with images, which makes for a light, informative and engrossing read. Surely, the artists among us would read it at a different level. Yet, it also easily works for the average reader who would like to know more about Goa and her artists. In reading through the texts, one gets hints of a century-old reality in the daispora too, the Goan community in Bombay, the patrons of art of those times, and much more.
By way of background, two short chapters introduce both to the artist himself, and also his collection. Trinidade is described as a “great twentieth-century artist from colonial Goa, who lived a major part of his life in British India”.
Some 33 paintings of his are on permanent display at the Galeria de Art, housed at the Fundação Oriente, in its Fontainhas, Panjim, location.
The story of how this reached here, back to Goa, is unusual in itself. His work was scattered across the globe — in the US, Canada, England, Brazil, Switzerland, Australia, and various parts of India. These were held by erstwhile princely rulers of India, art dealers, churches, convents, museums and “perhaps even in the drawers of ordinary folk”. At one time, we’re told, he traded his paintings for sugar and tea, which were scarce during World War I.
This work is filled with images. The story behind each is often explained in a useful manner. These range from Lady Tata in an Indo-Western outfit, to Goan fishing boats at low tide, Mahim, study of a man with a rosary, the sanyasi, the Armenian sisters, a Goan beggar and more.
His work reminds us of how much more cosmopolitan the city of Bombay was in those colonial times. Armenians, for instance, were among those who ended up in the city, along with Jews, Iranians, Europeans, Arabs, Japanese and Chinese.
But Trinidade also has portraits of so many faces from across India. Mendicants, Punjabi minstrels, a sadhu from the Deccan, and the like. There’s even a 1927 portrait of Annie Besant, someone whom we encounter in our history books at school.
Recent times have seen the growth of (a few) books focussing on the work of artists from Goa. Souza, of course, is the subject of a handful and more. Mário Miranda has had his work widely covered (though there is always space for much in such a world). Vamona Navelcar has a couple of books on him. Other artists (like Gaitonde, Pai, Lancelot Ribeiro) may have works which might be harder to access.
The Trinidades, both father and daughter Ângela, have been well served by scholarship. But with a subject like this, a reputation cannot depend only on exhibition, newspaper reports, websites or scattered catalogues. All these forms can be fragile, and could easily disappear.
By contrast, a good monograph brings together the artist’s biography, major works and appreciation earned. This makes it easier to preserve, cite or consult. This edition, brought out in a thousand-copy print-run, has also been seen in some bookshops, so access isn’t an issue.
It’s easy to find links (online too) to the artist and his work. These, for instance, take us to shorter works by historian Fatima da Silva Gracias, and the writings of Yashodhara Dalmia (Indian art historian and curator), Partha Mitter (former Sussex professor and historian of art and culture), among others.
On the last page of the book, a single-page bibliography points to more detailed works. These include family letters, Gracias, Bombay newspapers, scholarly writing, the letters of Sister Clare, and even a Maharashtra government history of the Sir JJ School of Art in 1957.
The book has been authored by Fátima da Silva Gracias and Paulo Jorge da Silva Gomes. Its foreword is by Carlos Monjardino, the banker-philanthropist.
Photography is carefully done by Akshay Mahajan, and the quality of the images, plus the well printed text, adds to the value of the book. The text review is by Anjali Dar Sengupta.
One can ‘read’ this book in two diverse ways. Firstly, it helps us appreciate the work of the artist. Its value we will only realise when we see a single watercolour by Trinidade being sold for almost five lakh rupees on some online site, as is the case right now on etsy.com.
As a book, the 2024-published Fundação Oriente work is of interest to artists and anyone wanting to understand the evolution of Goa, her expatriate population, and our regions in another era. Libraries and schools need a copy; there are role models here for our younger generation.
