Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads In and Out of Our Time

Lancelot Ribeiro

Heads In and Out of Our Time

Acknowledgments:

Enormous thanks are due to Marsha Ribeiro, for her tireless help, expertise, her moving and illuminating essay, and the generous loan of artworks from the Estate of Lancelot Ribeiro - many specially conserved, re-stretched and newly framed for the displayas well as for copyright permission to reproduce them. Many thanks also to Patricia Smithen for her insightful new research into Ribeiro’s materials and practice and to Rajagopal Parthasarathy for generously allowing us to reprint his essay (first published in Restless Ribeiro in 2013 and reprised in August 2020).

Huge thanks are due to the Ben Uri Collections and Exhibitions team: Clare Matthews and Joy Onyejiako, supported by interns Edie Goodman and Ethan Frieze and research volunteer Vivienne Huang, and the Research team: Rachel Dickson, Ana-Maria Milčić and Irene Iacono.

Reflection texts by Clare Matthews and Sarah MacDougall, with thanks to Marsha Ribeiro, David Buckman, Katriana Hazell and Joy Onyejiako.

A Reflection: Lancelot Ribeiro –Heads In and Out of Our Time

Contents

Acknowledgements

Director’s foreword: Lancelot Ribeiro – Heads In and Out of Our Time by Sarah MacDougall

Materials and Materiality: Lancelot Ribeiro’s Pioneering Early Use of Polyvinyl Acetate Paint by Patricia Smithen

Remembering Lance Ribeiro by Rajagopal Parthasarathy

My Father’s Studio – An Aladdin’s Cave by Marsha Ribeiro

Reflection of works

Timeline

Exhibitions

Bibliography

Fig. 2 Lancelot Ribeiro, c. 1964, Ribeiro Archive.

Front cover:

Cat. 20 Lancelot Ribeiro, Rising from the Banks of Main, c. 1989, Acrylic, oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas

Lancelot Ribeiro –

Heads In and Out of Our Time

The Ben Uri Research Unit (BURU), in partnership with the Estate of Lancelot Ribeiro, presents a reflection on our recent exhibition Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads – In and Out of Our Time. This is part of our principal focus on researching, documenting and celebrating the Refugee and Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900 (via buru.org.uk/diaspora-artists.net). This solo exhibition followed on from Ribeiro’s inclusion in Midnight’s Children: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain (2020), BURU’s first exhibition dedicated to a single nonEuropean immigrant group (presented online owing to the covid-19 pandemic)1. This displayed Ribeiro alongside his older half-brother F. N. Souza (1924–2002) and peers including Balraj Khanna (b. 1940), Avinash Chandra (1931–1991) and S.K. Bakre (1920–2007), as well as contemporary first- and second-generation Indian artists living and working in Britain.2 Chandra and Bakre were also both included in the recent Ben Uri exhibition Cosmopolis: The Impact of Refugee Art Dealers in London (2024) exploring the pivotal role of both émigré art dealers and the artists they represented, in transforming the London art scene between the 1930s and the 1960s.3

Ribeiro’s work first entered the Ben Uri Collection in 2022. The sharp-edged forms and jewel-like colours of his Townscape (1962) (fig. 3) are reminiscent of both the stained glass he observed in churches during his Catholic upbringing, and also of the technique of collage, afterwards an important aspect of his practice. Ribeiro explained that the landscapes were not of real, observed locations, but instead ‘a sort of collective experience’, that referenced the powerful impact of Christian imagery, as well as Souza’s early influence.4 Ribeiro’s monumental, hieratic head of King Lear (1964) (cat. 6), together with Ben Enwonwu’s The Dancer (Agbogho Mmuo - Maiden Spirit Mask) (1962) opened Ben Uri’s Art, Identity, Migration exhibition at the 2023 London Art Fair, showcasing the significance of the postwar immigrant contribution to British visual art. The current display, inspired by this important work, borrows its title from the artist’s own long-planned but unrealised concept for an exhibition, featuring 20 paintings and drawings, as well as photographs and archival materials, focusing on Ribeiro’s preoccupation with portraiture and imagined heads from two of the most innovative decades of his practice, the 1960s and the 1990s.

Lanceloté José Belarmino Ribeiro was born into a Catholic Goan family in present day Mumbai in 1933. Between the ages of nine and eleven, he boarded at St Mary’s Catholic School in Mount Abu (Rajasthan), under the harsh regime of Irish Christian Brothers, an experience that haunted him but also, he observed, set him on his path ‘as an image-maker’.5

Fig. 3 Lancelot Ribeiro, Townscape, 1962, Ben Uri Collection.

His early sketchbook from St. Xaviers (fig. 4) includes wartime caricatures of Adolf Hitler. Following the turmoil that followed Partition in 1947 and the creation of two independent dominions: India and Pakistan, Ribeiro followed his older half-brother Souza – ‘Sonnie’ - to Britain in 1950, initially to study accountancy, although he soon began attending evening life drawing classes at St Martin’s School of Art. After returning to Bombay in 1955, Ribeiro embraced both art and poetry but after securing his first solo, sell-out exhibition in 1961, with the help of German-Jewish émigré art critic, Rudi von Leyden (1909–1983), he became a full-time artist.6 He executed a large mural commission for Tata Iron and Steel (fig. 5) and, by the end of 1962, having participated in 10 group and solo exhibitions, including Ten Indian Painters, was nominated for the AllIndia Gold Medal. He returned to London the same year, co-founding the Indian Painters’ Collective, UK (IPC) in 1963. This followed the 1962 Act controlling the previous liberal postwar immigration policy and was Ribeiro’s own response to the racism he encountered. He initiated the exhibition Six Indian Painters (fig. 6) in 1964, and held his first UK solo exhibition in Hampstead in 1965 (fig. 7), a review of which included the following encounter: ‘Looking curiously at a painting of a man with a long, lopsided face, a distorted mouth and a strange coloured complexion, I asked the artist what it was. ‘A self-portrait’, he answered!’ - a reply at once ambiguous, disingenuous and provocative.7

Drawing on his background, Ribeiro’s early works utilised heads, both archetypal and imagined, in dramatic close up, as a vehicle to explore concepts of power and evil, described by one reviewer as: ‘Colonialists, kings, tyrants, Christ (resurrected), tycoons, women and thugs’.8 Employing dramatic contrasts of size, form and colour, he created memorable images that are at once personal, but also universal, questioning notions of identity, belonging, alienation and the divided self, as well as reflecting the concerns of the postwar era with the collapse of Empire, continuing decolonisation (Goa was liberated from Portuguese rule in 1961), and rising geopolitical Cold War tensions, including the Vietnam War. The vehicles for Ribeiro’s imagery range from religious icons (particularly the suffering Christ) to embodiments of male tyranny: ‘kings’, though menacing of aspect, wear crowns reminiscent of Christ’s Crown of Thorns that also echo the sharp-edged architectural forms of his early townscapes, while some of his graphic images (cats. 14 and 15) combine the two. By contrast, Ribeiro’s ‘queen’ (cat. 9) suggests mischievousness rather than malice; his Madonnas (cats. 2 and 20) are loving and conciliatory; the likeness of his wife, Ana Rita Pinto Correia (cat. 11), mother of his two children, is his only true portrait.

Ribeiro’s experiments with new materials, among them, polyvinyl acetate or PVA (a precursor of acrylic paint), sometimes mixed with other non-traditional media, including string, as in his favourite painting, The Warlord (Tate) (fig. 9), extended his exploration of the head.

Fig. 4 St. Xaviers sketchbook, Ribeiro Archive.

This resulted in a set of radical, faceless, abstracted heads, known as the Psychedelic Man series including the technically innovative Beastly and Beautiful (1964) (cat. 8), while the haunting Paranoid (1965) (cat. 7) and The Artist’s Torment (c. 1964) (cat. 12) speak to his inner artistic struggles. In his later work, Ribeiro continued to experiment with materials, employing brilliant acrylics mixed with elements of collage to return to one of his principal motifs, disassembling, reimagining and reinvigorating the head. In works such as Seeing Through (1989) (cat. 17), the head is reduced to a single eye and the bridge of a nose. In The Flowering of Man (1998) (cat. 18), and Head - in an Abundance of Nothing (1998) (cat. 19), the latter flatly painted but enlivened by a luxuriantly rich red palette, he juxtaposes images of hope and despair. The vivid blue of Rising from the Banks of Main (1992) (cat. 20), with the head of a Madonna in profile, brings his religious imagery full circle. Yet behind them all, as Ribeiro’s close friend and fellow poet, Indian translator and critic Rajagopal Parthasarathy, suggests, Ribeiro’s ‘true subject’ is always his ‘origins – Goan roots, estrangement from India, and exile in London. How does a human being come to terms with multiple histories and in the process achieve wholeness?’.9

In the accompanying essays, these themes and motifs are explored further. Patricia Smithen contextualises Ribeiro’s role in the development of materials and their conservation story, also exploring his role as a technical innovator in the acrylics’ market with his unique application of materials, particularly oils, PVA and synthetic dyes. Rajagopal Parthasarathy situates Ribeiro, initially in their shared hometown of Bombay, among his formative influences, and later in his adopted homeland of Britain, charting their long friendship from youth to old age, and the flowering of Ribeiro’s creativity as both poet and painter, against this changing backdrop along the way. While Marsha Ribeiro, from the unique perspective of a child growing up with an artist father, traces not only her father’s passage from India to the UK – from Bombay to Belsize Park – but also offers insights into his experiences as an artist, an exile, a husband, and a father, making his way and reputation in postwar London, endlessly innovative and creative to the last.

The second part of this Reflection explores a further display of 20 stylistically diverse and innovative paintings, sculptures and works on paper of heads and portraits from the Ben Uri collection that respond to aspects of Ribeiro’s work. These include Moich Abrahams self-portrait (cat. 21) with its warning, ‘Goes Quick’, recalling Ribeiro’s urgently scrawled signature across Witness - the Signing and the Design, with the artist’s name writ large across its surface. Both suggest the transience of life and the importance of the artist’s role in bearing witness, while Sarah Lightman’s graphic self-portrait (cat. 37) captures the impermanence of the short-lived moment, the mutability of moods. Dodo’s self-portrait, Annunciation (cat. 26) invokes Christian imagery to explore the inner life - the notion of the divided self, examining emotions including alienation, grief and despair.

Fig. 5 Arts & Events, 1961, showing Ribeiro in front of Tata Iron and Steel mural, and The Colonialist (lost), Ribeiro Archive.

Created in 1933, the year of Hitler’s accession to the German chancellorship, it ushers in a tumultuous era of racial, religious and cultural persecution that precipitated the ‘forced journeys’ of many Hitler emigres to Britain (Dodo, among them, as well as Lom, Hersch, Bilbo, Auerbach, Simon and Nemon). Lom’s innovative response to (re)using everyday materials, and including, like Ribeiro, collage, reflects the typical resourcefulness of the refugee. Also created around 1933, the dignified portrait of an African American woman (cat. 40) by Albert Abramovitz, a Jewish immigrant from the Russian Empire, who settled in Paris, and then New York, draws attention to the continuing legacy of racial and social inequality, prior to the rise of the American Civil Rights movement. Jack Bilbo’s boldly coloured portrait (cat. 22) propels us forward into the vibrant experimentalism of sixties’ culture, so richly explored on many levels by Ribeiro, while other portraits (by Paul Richards (cat. 27), Susanna Jacobs (cat. 28), Oscar Nemon (cat. 36), Bruno Simon), self-portraits (by Eugen Hersch (cat. 32), Alfred Daniels (cat. 29) and Alfred Harris (cat. 31)) and imagined heads (Mosheh Oved (cats. 34 & 35), Gerald Marks (cat. 24), David Breuer-Weil (cats. 38 & 39)), encompassing drawings, watercolours, oils and sculpture, seek to establish character, as well as likeness, and to invoke the inner life (Breuer-Weil takes us literally inside the head), documenting the process of living and ageing in all its complexity.

The final section concludes with contextual works by the oldest and youngest artists of Indian origin in the Ben Uri Collection: Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin (born Samuel Rahamin Samuel to a Jewish family belonging to India’s Bene Israel community in Poona (now Pune), India. His portrait of the young Rosalind Adler (cat. 42) reflects the Western influence of his Royal Academy tutors John Singer Sargent and Solomon J Solomon, prior to his return to India, when he abandoned naturalism in favour of the two-dimensional figuration traditionally associated with Rajput painting and converted to Islam prior to his marriage. He is believed to be the first Indian artist and the first Muslim artist to enter the Tate collection in 1925 and, as recent research has uncovered, was also the first Indian and Muslim artist to enter the Ben Uri Collection, around 1960.

More recently, in 2018, Hormazd Narielwalla, became the first contemporary Indian-born artist to enter the collection with Bands of Pride (2017) (cat. 41), commissioned by the Migrations Museum for the exhibition, No Turning Back: Seven Migration Moments that Changed Britain, a multi-panel collage responding to the 13th-century expulsion of Jewish people from England. Fyzee-Rahamin and Narielwalla can thus be seen, like Ribeiro, to draw attention to and explore multiple histories and the search for identity, both in and out of our time.

Fig. 6 Six Indian Painters, exhibition invitation (reverse), 9 November 1964, Ribeiro Archive.

Fig. 8 Lancelot Ribeiro, Christ with Stigmata, c. 1961, studio photograph, Ribeiro Archive.

Fig. 9 Unknown photographer, Lancelot Ribeiro with Warlord, 1968, photograph, Ribeiro Archive.

1. Curated by Rachel Dickson. See ed., Rachel Dickson, Midnight’s Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain: https://issuu.com/benurigallery/docs/midnight_s_family_70_years_of_indian_artists_in_br

2. F. N. Souza (1924 Goa, India (then Portuguese India) – 2002 Mumbai, India), Balraj Khanna (b. 1940 Punjab, India), Avinash Chandra (1931 Shimla (Simla), India – 1991 London, England) and S.K. Bakre (1920 Gujarat, India – 2007 Maharashtra, India).

3. Curated by Helena Cuss, Cosmopolis: The Impact of Refugee Art Dealers in London (London: Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, 26 June –6 September 2024): https://website-benurigallery.artlogic.net/exhibitions/87/overview/ Online reflection forthcoming.

4. Lancelot Ribeiro, ‘Indian Art through the Ages”, Commonwealth Institute Conference, 9-10 March 1972, cited Katriana Hazell, Restless Ribeiro (Bangkok: River Books, 2013), p. 17.

5. Ribeiro’s undated archival notes found, written c. 1980s–90s. I am grateful to Marsha Ribeiro for supplying this reference.

6. Art critic Rudolf von Leyden (1909 Berlin, Germany – 1983 Vienna, Austria) was a ‘Hitler émigré’ from Nazi Germany, based in Bombay in the 1940s and credited with playing a significant role in helping to shape modern art in India. See Reema Desai Gehi The Catalyst: Rudolf von Leyden and India’s Artistic Awakening (Speaking Tiger, 2024). and https://archive.metromod.net/viewer.p/69/2951/object/5138-7555962

7. Cited Katriana Hazell, Restless Ribeiro: An Indian Artist in Britain (?London: River Books, 2013), p. 30.

8. Anon., review of Bombay Artist Aid Centre exhibition, 1961, cited ibid., p. 38.

9. See Rajagopal Parthasarathy’s essay in this volume.

Fig. 7 Solo exhibition Hampstead, 1965, Ribeiro Archive.

Materials and Materiality:

Lancelot

Ribeiro’s Pioneering Early Use of Polyvinyl Acetate Paint by Patricia Smithen

When Lancelot Ribeiro returned to London in 1962, having launched a successful career as an artist in Bombay, he was painting expressionistic visions of towns, still lives and figures largely executed with artist oils. The surfaces were rich, textured and varied and Ribeiro took advantage of the paste-like qualities of the medium to create broken layers of colour combined with the streaky, soft blending of wet-in-wet applications (fig. 10). Untitled (Christ with Stigmata) (1961) (cat. 3) exemplifies this technique. A detail of the stigmata illustrates the variety of application: the palette-knife applied grey base, a wet-in-wet streaky swirl of black and white applied with a stiff brush and the thinned centre of black partly brushed and partly flowing down to create the line of blood (fig. 11). The artist was practiced at manipulating this material to gain a variety of expressive effects and yet he was not entirely satisfied with oil paint. According to Patrick Boylan, Ribeiro became disaffected with oil due to the tedious and lengthy process required to ensure a stable and long-lasting surface, and he became intrigued by polyvinyl acetate or PVA paints as an addition to his practice.1 First incorporating it alongside oil, by the end of the decade, he was making paintings with PVAc as the primary medium in his work.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s in London many artists were testing alternatives to oil paint, such as industrial and house paints, and experimentation was rife amongst those interested in exploring abstraction and expressionism. While many artists worked with quick-drying commercial oil-resin paints, others were looking to minimise their use of noxious solvents. Waterborne PVAc emulsions were a feasible alternative and this plastic resin medium provided other benefits. Widely available during the 1950s as tins of household decorative paints, these fluid formulations were designed to be applied in thin layers with an even matte or satin finish.2 A thin coat of PVAc housepaint could be touch-dry and ready to be repainted within an hour, unlike oils which took many hours or days to polymerise. Artist Paul Huxley (b. 1938) described how he and his contemporaries purchased high quality PVAc house paints from a shop in Turnham Green, using them to create fields of flat, even colour on canvases, before acrylic paints became available.3 Some artists made their own paints using the PVAc emulsion itself, a viscous, milky substance which dried clear in a few hours. This allowed them to tailor the properties of the material to their liking, although it could be challenging to make a high-quality paint due to its stickiness and quick drying behaviour.

Fig. 10 Detail from Untitled (Christ with Stigmata) (1961)

Cat. 3 Untitled (Christ with Stigmata), 1961, Oil on board

Fig. 11 Detail from Untitled (Christ with Stigmata) (1961)

Harry Thubron (Henry James Thubron, 1915–85), a pioneering art teacher at Leeds University College of Art between 1956–64, experimented with mixing different resins provided by the Imperial Chemical Company (ICI) with pigments to determine how they worked, and whether the colours changed when they were used for artistic purposes.4

Through this period, British artist-paint manufacturers began developing acrylic and PVAc paint products that were proving successful with artists in America. Artist acrylic colours and mediums became available for sale in London in early 1963 (Rowney Cryla) and Reeves introduced their acrylic vinyl Polymer Colours in 1964. Reeves produced a film, Polymer – a New Medium for the Artist, which featured Francis Souza (1924–2002), Ribeiro’s brother, and used this content in subsequent print advertisements. Souza was quoted saying, ‘I found the paint very versatile and most satisfying and am able to build up thick layers of colour very fast’.5 In the mid-1960s, Brian Rogerson of Spectrum Oil Colours introduced a range of make-your-own PVA paint system which included the PVAc base, a matting agent, thickener, water tension breaker and pigment pastes, however these were not widely available in shops until the 1980s.

In 1963 Ribeiro’s options for purchasing waterborne, emulsion paints were limited to Rowney’s Cryla colours and household emulsions. Apparently, neither of these provided him with the features that he desired for his increasingly abstract work, and he directed his efforts into formulating his own paints. In the autumn of 1963 Ribeiro wrote to industrial producers of synthetic polymer emulsions to ask about a suitable paint medium and to request samples. His initial intention for these products was explained in a draft letter, written in response to a query from the Arabol Manufacturing Company. He wrote, ‘What I have in mind is a P.V.A., in emulsion form, that -if required- can be further diluted and dyed with water dissolvent colours before use. I intend it to act as a non-porous base, which, when applied on cloth, board, paper, etc., will make them capable of holding oil paint. The PVA emulsion should have an approx [sic] 24-hour drying time and be transparent when dry even though it may contain a little dye’.6 At least in the beginning, he was keen to use this medium to create a flexible, fast-drying primer for his oils and the requirement that the medium be transparent was key to his desires. Commercial PVAc household paints mainly were opaque to provide good decorative coverage over walls. Rowney’s acrylic medium might have sufficed, but it was only available in small jars and was more expensive than industrial products, particularly when these companies might provide free samples.

The Lancelot Ribeiro archive contains correspondences and rare, ephemeral pamphlets from 14 companies who responded to his requests for information and samples. The artist received 15 technical bulletins outlining product information, and seven companies sent samples, comprising 11 different products in total. While ICI initially redirected him to a supplier, Boylan reported that they later sent Ribeiro a 22-gallon container of PVAc.7

Fig. 12 Detail from Mother and Child (1965)

The information sheets from Epok contained sample paint formulations and recommendations for mixing techniques and additives, such as thickening agents, bactericides, and more. The instructions make it clear that any particulate colours needed to be pre-dispersed before adding them to the emulsion blend; this ensured that pigments would not clump together and that the resulting paint would be smooth and lump-free.

During this same period, Ribeiro obtained a range of sample-sized containers of pigment dyes from Ciba-Geigy, from their Irgalite and Irgazin range. These industrial colorants were designed to tint flexible and rigid plastic products, inks, and a wide range of other mass-produced items. The coloured particles were tiny and uniform; this provided a large surface area resulting in intense coloration even with a small amount of the powder. Crucially, they were compatible with aqueous systems and a pre-mixed paste would disperse into PVAc emulsion. The archive retains 27 containers of the dyes and Boylan related that Ribeiro was still actively using these colourants in the 1980s.8

Within these documents is another clue to the origin of his interest in these materials. When Ribeiro wrote to Margros regarding their PVAc Marvin Medium, they replied confirming that this was exactly the same product as the one used by Souza.9 They subsequently wrote, ‘We would advise you that Mr. Souza is obtaining this material from us at a very special price, as he was one of the original people who started work on this material and indirectly was responsible for our company taking up this material and adapting it for use by artists.’10

This response indicates that Ribeiro’s inquiry would have mentioned Souza directly. Given that Souza was involved in the development of PVAc paints for Reeves and had already established a relationship with Margros, it seems likely that he introduced his brother to PVAc mediums. And yet, despite Souza’s continuing association with Reeves throughout the 1960s, Ribeiro did not seem interested in purchasing pre-made colours in tubes or jars. What was he seeking that commercial products could not provide? Close examination of two paintings from 1965 helps illustrate the different properties he was exploiting with this new medium.

Mother and Child I (1965) (cat. 2) features a complex glossy surface built up with translucent tints of rich colour, like stained glass. Large areas of diaphanous reds, pinks, oranges, yellows, blue and turquoise cover the canvas while also revealing its weave and texture, surmounted with strokes, lines, flourishes and speckles. In the centre of the painting, Ribeiro dropped liquid colour into a pool of wet, stained PVAc, resulting in characteristic swirling forms terminating in dendritic fingers (fig. 12). To the right of this, a thin layer of opaque white oil paint was applied over the wet PVAc – the oil and water layers repelled each other to form pockmarked islands and more swirling patterns (fig. 13). Black lines pick out and define the forms while scumbles of semi-opaque white partially hide the layers beneath (fig. 14).

Fig. 13 Detail from Mother and Child (1965)

Fig. 14 Detail from Mother and Child (1965)

The experimental application of paint is a study in contrasts: opacity and translucency, pouring and brushing, blending versus layering, and intermingled forms versus crisp edges. The PVAc in combination with oil provided Ribeiro with a wide of options in terms of application and effects – and he could work quickly.

Untitled (Green Head) (c. 1965) (cat. 10) is more restrained in its colouration and surface complexity and Ribeiro has limited the range of mark marking as well. The artist stained the canvas with translucent green paint, leaving the head in reserve, where the exposed raw canvas provided the base (fig. 15). The black PVAc paint was poured onto the canvas, but it was directed, not splashed. It forms curvaceous, drippy lines and pools thickly. Some of the paint is pulled out into fine hatching lines and arcs. The dripped paint has a very different quality to the geometric forms in the top left corner – those were applied with a flat brush. The black paint is still translucent enough that the double thickness of paint at the ends and overlaps of strokes is evident. The lines are precise – there are no corrections or revisions – yet they are still shaky and imperfect. A star-like shape with the flat brushed lines is punctuated with a precise drop of black at its centre (fig. 16). A third colour was introduced – a translucent orange paint, dabbed on, intermingling with the black around the figure and pure in the flourishes of the geometric form. Even with a limited colour palette, Ribeiro managed to extract a good range of effects, playing with the viscosity of PVAc. It could flow freely in a more liquid application, like the green stain, or be controlled in a more viscous form, like the black paint. The paint colours remain remarkably fresh and intense, even after 50 years, and the surface is not marred by any cracks or apparent yellowing, apart from the creamy tones of the canvas itself. However, that flexibility did come at a price, as the thick black paint does soften in warm temperatures, entrapping dust particles. And yet, the surface still gleams and glitters with plastic reflectance.

In making his own paint, Ribeiro was able to wield control over the qualities of his materials and, particularly, the degree of opacity. Despite the introduction of many new commercial products throughout the 1960s, the artist continued to experiment with his own concoctions, fully exploring the many features of PVAc which helped him to express his ideas in visual form. His mastery of the plastic medium took him in new artistic directions.

1. Patrick Boylan, “Lancelot Ribeiro – The Man and his Art” in Restless Ribeiro River Books Co, Ltd, 2013,8.

2. Morana Novak and Bronwyn Ormsby, “Poly (Vinyl Acetate) Paints: A Literature Review of Material Properties, Ageing Characteristics, and Conservation Challenges,” Polymers, 15(22), 7 November 2023.

3. Paul Huxley interview by Patricia Smithen, 21 February 2017.

4. Jon Thompson Interviewed by Cathy Courtney, “National Life Stories: Artist Lives.” British Library Sounds, 3 May 2012, https://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/Art/021M-C0466X0312XX-0023V0

5. Reeves, General Reflection, 1975: 16.

6. Handwritten draft on a letter from A.R. Idendum, The Arabol Manufacturing Company, 29 October 1963, Lancelot Ribeiro Archive.

7. Boylan, 8.

8. Boylan, 9.

9. E.R. Pipe to Lancelot Ribeiro, letter dated 25 October 1963. Lancelot Ribeiro Archive.

10. P.G. Hooley to Lancelot Ribeiro, letter dated 30 January 1964, Lancelot Ribeiro Archive.

Cat. 10 Untitled (Green Head) (c.1965)

Fig. 15 Detail from Untitled (Green Head) (c.1965) Fig. 16 Detail from Untitled (Green Head) (c.1965)

Remembering Lance Ribeiro by R.

Parthasarathy

I first met Lance in Bombay (now Mumbai) at a poetry reading at the British Council on Homji Street, Fort, in 1955 when I was an undergrad at Bombay University and Lance worked as an agent for the Life Insurance Corporation of India. Lance had recently returned from London, where he had studied life drawing as a part-time student for two years, from 1951 to 1953, at Saint. Martin’s School of Art. From 1955 to 1960, we would meet on Saturday afternoons at Hira Building, the home of his parents, João and Lilia Ribeiro, across the street from Crawford Market in downtown Bombay. The Sir J. J. School of Art, where Lance’s half-brother Sonnie (the painter Francis Newton Souza) had studied in the early 1940s before being expelled in 1945 for participating in the Quit India movement, was close by. Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born on the school campus where his father John Lockwood Kipling was professor of architectural sculpture (1865–1874). The traffic near Crawford Market was, I remember, horrendous. Street noises would travel three storeys up to the living room where we talked, often joined in by Lance’s sister Marina, who was a flight attendant with Air India.1

Lance and I would read each other’s poems aloud and talk about them for hours. He was a good judge of poetry with an unerring instinct for the finer nuances of language. Both of us were in our early twenties and hoped to be published poets someday (a feat I achieved in 1977 with the publication of Rough Passage).2 However, in 1959, Lance abandoned poetry for painting. I record this event in the poem “Portrait of a Friend as an Artist,” which appeared ten years later in London Magazine, edited by the poet Alan Ross (1922–2001).

Fig. 17 Unknown photographer, Ribeiro and Souza in London, 1950s, photograph, Ribeiro Archive.

He too was a poet till he gave up, one day, blowing rings of poems. Now paints are his cup of tea, often laced with the thin sugar of Goan memories: churches with inoffensive bells in their loins, shoulders lopped off, epaulettes and all, stone-blind in the eyes, and strutting crosses on every hill (skulls, or whatever remains, of Catholic Europe) that stare at you all over. From Belsize Park, he writes tenderly of the brown weekends of our youth in Bombay. Arrogance was second nature to him, something we shared in common. And a love of words.3

Fig. 18 Azossim House, 1960s, Ribeiro Archive.

I learned from Lance’s daughter Marsha that Lance treasured this poem. P. L. Brent had included the poem in his anthology, Young Commonwealth Poets ’65, and I had sent Lance a copy of the book.4 Marsha tells me that Lance ‘would carry the book … and very quietly, unassumingly and touchingly show it [the poem] to friends, especially in the last years of his life.’5

Early in his career as a painter, Lance had been very much under the influence of Souza (1924–2002) (fig. 17), who had already established himself as the leading Indian painter of his generation, that included K. H. Ara (1914–1985), M. F. Husain (1915–2011), S. H. Raza (1922–2016), Mohan Samant (1924–2004), Tyeb Mehta (1925–2009), and Akbar Padamsee (1928–2020). In 1947, Souza and Raza had formed the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay. They had turned away from the nationalist art of the Bengal school in favor of European modernism, thus laying the foundation of modern art in post-Independence India. In this they were mentored by a trio of European Jewish émigrés, Rudolf von Leyden (1908–1983), Walter Langhammer (1905–1977), and Emmanuel Schlesinger (d. 1968), who had arrived in Bombay to escape the Holocaust. Later, von Leyden and Schlesinger began to collect Lance’s work. Before long Lance would break away from Souza’s influence and establish himself on his own. But Goa remained the one subject that continued to inform the work of the two brothers.

It was around 1959, on Calangute Beach, Goa, that Lance met his future wife, Ana Rita Pinto Correia (fig. 19). Six months later, on May 21, 1960, they were married in Woodhouse Church, Colaba, Bombay. Ana Rita’s family was part of the Goan-Portuguese élite. Gentle, soft-spoken, and self-effacing, Ana Rita provided the anchor that Lance badly needed. He couldn’t have chosen a better life partner.

Lance invested the Goan landscape with the resonance of a metaphor. To understand the source of his inspiration, I decided to travel to Goa. I arrived in Panjim (now Panaji) by boat in the summer of 1960. All along the River Mandovi, white-washed bungalows with imbricated tiles nested in groves of palm trees. Churches rose in prayer from every hilltop. Lance was there waiting for me at the pier. We boarded a rickety bus (carreira) and set off for Lance’s village of Azossim (fig. 18) in Ilhas (now Tiswadi) taluka, where his mother cooked us a traditional Goan meal, comprising grilled fish, prawn balchão, and bebinca. The next day, we were treated to a breakfast of peza (rice porridge) spiced with mango pickles.

I saw Goa through Lance’s eyes and was overwhelmed by the blend of Portuguese and Indian cultures. Goa had after all been the crown jewel of Portuguese imperial possessions for 450 years. It is here, in the Basilica of Bom Jesus, that the embalmed body of St. Francis Xavier (1506–1552), the Apostle of the Indies and patron saint of Goa, rests undisturbed. It was here that Luís

Vaz de Camões (1524–580) became a great poet, having spent six years (1561–1567) as a common soldier. Old Goa was a bit of medieval Europe transplanted onto Indian soil. Portuguese rule permanently affected the Goan way of life. As a result, the Goan sensibility is unlike that of any other in India.

My experience of Goa eventually took the shape of a poem, “Luís Vaz de Camões,” that is as much a tribute to Camões as it is to Goa’s artistic heritage of which Lance was a custodian.

Gulls wrinkle the air.

The boat heaves, opens the river’s eye in the twinkling of a street.

Houses drop into place.

The engine stops. From the funnel, smoke balloons towards Ilhas.

You step out, and a carreira takes you to the heart of Goa.

Echo of immaculate bells from hilltops

flagged with pale crosses.

Under the sun’s oppressive glare he stands alone

in a corner, an unrepentant schoolboy, book in hand, spanning an empire

from the Tagus to the China Seas.

You stop to take a picture: a storm of churches breaks about your eyes.6

One of the recurring topics of Lance’s conversations with me over the years was that we travel to Portugal and experience for ourselves the Iberian elements in Goan culture; but we never made it to Portugal. I gather from Marsha that Lance did visit Portugal on his own sometime later.

I remember the excitement that surrounded Lance’s first one-man show at the Bombay Art Society Salon in April 1961 (fig. 20).

The exhibition was an instant success and was followed by a commission from Tata Iron and Steel to paint a twelve-foot mural. Among Lance’s patrons at this time were the nuclear physicist and painter Homi J. Bhabha and the art critic of The Times of India, Rudolf von Leyden, who wrote of a later show: ‘Lance Ribeiro has a fine sense and quality of colour. His pictures have an impressive strength and great emotional power. He is a painter to be understood and studied.’7

In April 1962, about two months before Lance moved to London (Ana Rita and their one-year-old daughter Raissa followed in December), the American poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Peter Orlovsky were in Bombay. After their reading on the terrace of theater director Ebrahim Alkazi’s house on Warden Road, Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Lance, and I, together with the American poets, walked down to Ezekiel’s apartment at 67 Breach Candy. When we got there, Ginsberg wanted to know what Indian poets were like. At his request, Ezekiel, Jussawalla, Lance, and I read our poems. Lance hadn’t, after all, given up poetry. He himself says so in a letter written 32 years later: ‘I paint without the slightest worry; never a sense of doubt. Why do I feel so inadequate putting words to paper? . . . and yet such a need to do it. Perhaps words give more away. Maybe it’s the reason most of my writing is incomplete.’8

After Lance and Ana Rita’s move to London, we met only occasionally. But Lance always kept in touch through letters. In September 1963, I caught up with him in his Priory Road, West Hampstead apartment on my way to Leeds University in the north of England for graduate studies. The next time I saw Lance was in January 1979 on my way home to New Delhi from a writer’s residency at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, in the U. S. Lance and Ana Rita had separated by then, and Lance had moved out of their Belsize Park Gardens apartment to Egbert Street in Chalk Farm. I stayed with Lance, and we often went for long walks on Hampstead Heath. The last time Lance and I met was in August 1997 on my way back from Leiden to the U. S., where I had moved in 1982. We spent an entire day together, beginning with a long lazy lunch at the Brasserie Chez Gérard near his home and rounding off the evening with a visit to the Old Vic to see a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull in Tom Stoppard’s version.

Lance had been living for almost 20 years in a one-bedroom apartment at 214 Haverstock Hill in Hampstead, north-west London—home to such celebrities as George Orwell, T. S. Eliot, Yehudi Menuhin, Walter Gropius, Henry Moore, and Lucian Freud. There were paintings and scraps of writing everywhere, including the bathroom. Water leaking through the roof had left its mark on many of them. Unfinished paintings littered the bed and floor. The paintings seem to have taken over the apartment, displacing their creator. It was an unhappy state of affairs. Lance offered an explanation in a letter to me: ‘I was too scarred by a stormy childhood that had successfully messed me up—a basket case masked with constantly changing façades and rarely knowing which one I had on. I lacked the capacity to handle the simplest aspects of life’s generalities, never mind its complex issues and certainties.

Fig. 19 Ana Rita, 1961, Ribeiro Archive.

Fig. 20 BAS invitation, inauguration by R. von Leyden, 1961, Ribeiro Archive.

Unfortunately, not much has changed.’9 He kept himself aloof from the politics of the London art scene and withdrew into his own world more and more. He began to exhibit regularly in Germany, which he found to be more receptive to his work. Fortunately, in July 2010, Marsha relocated Lance’s paintings to a storage facility that also doubled as his studio.

For someone with so prodigious a talent, Lance was philosophical about the value of his work. Commercial galleries rarely exhibited his work: his paintings did not sell. However, private buyers often visited him. Lance accepted the situation. He knew he was not in fashion. He told me once that a dear friend of his, the influential art critic Bettina Wadia (née Wadlová), had taken him to task for his reluctance to promote himself: ‘Do you know how many artists contact me in the most abject and despicable way every single day? And here you are, with me trying my damnedest, and you don’t even respond’.10 That was Lance. He wasn’t the sort of person who would draw attention to himself or go out of his way to push his own work. He kept to himself. In the more than half a century that I had known him, I had always found him to be passionate about ideas. This was often the case when Sonnie was around in Bombay in the early 1960s. The two brothers had strong opinions about themselves, often bordering on arrogance, but they never talked about them. Not once had I seen Lance lose his composure in my presence. But fame would come to him unexpectedly towards the end of his life. One of Lance’s enduring achievements was that he helped to develop PVA acrylic paint and pioneered its use by his own example. Acrylics brightened up the colouring and gave his paintings an enamel finish.

A certain nostalgia, best expressed by the Portuguese word saudade, for Goa permeates all of Lance’s work. Lance would have endorsed with a chuckle Souza’s boast to the Goan writer Vivek Menezes when the latter had visited him in his New York apartment: ‘I’ve swallowed Goa whole; I’ve digested it all. You can see it reproduced all around you.’ 11Lance too had ‘swallowed Goa whole’ and had ‘digested it all’. As a Goan, Lance was inordinately proud of his heritage. The spectacular Goan landscape, the white-washed churches that raise their fullthroated spires in every village, and the fabulous wooden icons inside them— all turned into memorable images in Lance’s work; they continue to haunt me to this day. Loss of homeland and residence in England had only sharpened Lance’s vision of Goa. It had made him see and hear the immemorial rhythms of everyday Goan life with precision and clarity. His paintings capture this vision in sharp abstract images that tumble onto the canvases like a waterfall. They explode with colours that recreate, in the heart of London, the harsh brilliance of a tropical world that Lance had left behind almost 50 years ago. ‘One must wait until the evening’, wrote Sophocles (496–406 B.C.E.), ‘to see how splendid the day has been’.12 and without doubt, Lance’s day had been extraordinarily splendid.

However, the true subject of Lance’s paintings is, I believe, origins—Goan roots, estrangement from India, and exile in London. How does a human being come to terms with multiple histories and in the process achieve wholeness? Both Lance and I grew up under the Raj that left an indelible mark on us. Lance was critical of both the Raj and the Estado da Índia. His criticism of both was subtle, not abrasive. It is there as a subtext in many of his works. Lance’s paintings are intricate networks of colour that attempt to establish connections that reach out for something tangible outside of himself. They are floating histories of the man and of his and our predicament.

Lance’s voice will always remain with me. It was deep-throated and sensuous. He could have been a singer had he wished to. When he talked, you listened. He spoke with authority on a wide range of subjects. But Goa remained the epicenter of his consciousness. ‘He was painting’, Marsha wrote me in an email, ‘until the very last’.13

Lance died at home at 214 Haverstock Hill, on Christmas Day, 2010 at the age of 77 and was cremated on 11 January 2011 to the strains of Psalm 23 and Henry Francis Lyte’s moving hymn, “Abide with me”, at the Golders Green Crematorium, off Finchley Road, not far from where he had lived as a pordexi Goenkar for close to 50 years. His death had gone unnoticed in India, but it has left a void in my life—a void best expressed by Lance himself: ‘This absence of contact seems to have been so needless. I feel a sense of great loss after hearing you on the phone’.14

1. I am grateful to Ana Rita Ribeiro and Marsha Ribeiro for their prompt response to my queries.

2. R. Parthasarathy, Rough Passage (Delhi: Oxford University Press, Three Crowns Series, 1977).

3. R. Parthasarathy, “Portrait of a Friend as an Artist”, London Magazine (December 1969).

4. R. Parthasarathy, “Portrait of a Friend,” in ed. P. L. Brent, Young Commonwealth Poets ’65 (London: William Heinemann, 1965).

5. Marsha Ribeiro, email to the author, 6 April 2012.

6. R. Parthasarathy, “Luís Vaz de Camões,” titled “Exile 6,” Rough Passage, p. 21.

7. Rudolph von Leyden, Eve’s Weekly (14 November 1961).

8. Lancelot Ribeiro, letter to the author, dated 13 November 1994.

9. Lancelot Ribeiro, letter to the author, dated 29 November 2004.

10. Lancelot Ribeiro in conversation with the author in London, January 1979.

11. Vivek Menezes, “The Man Who Swallowed Goa Whole,” in ed., Jerry Pinto Reflections in Water: Writings on Goa (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006), p. 183.

12. Source unknown. Generally attributed to Sophocles.

13. Marsha Ribeiro, email to the author, 3 February 2011.

14. Lancelot Ribeiro, letter to the author, dated 13 November 1994.

My Father’s Studio – an Aladdin’s Cave by

Marsha Ribeiro

It was in Belsize Park Gardens that my father, the Indian Expressionist painter Lancelot Ribeiro, first established his studio (fig. 21); the memory of which always comes flooding back to me whenever I think back to my childhood.

London was a place he had got to know in his teenage years. He had already spent what he described as ‘six bitter winters’ in post-war Britain where he had been sent to study accountancy. Arriving in 1950, he initially lodged with his older brother (the artist FN Souza) in Chalk Farm’s Chalcot Square and so naturally felt an affinity to London’s NW3 neighbourhood. Britain was also the place, over this period, where the initial rumblings of an artistic and poetic temperament had started to emerge. He was attending life drawing classes at Saint Martin’s School of Art, immersing himself in jewellery-making and design and delving into poetry.

He returned to Bombay in 1955 and three years later was writing poetry and painting professionally. By the time he had made the decision to head to Britain for a new life, he had already had ten successful exhibitions under his belt in Bombay, Delhi, Calcutta and Madras, including Ten Indian Painters - an exhibition sponsored by UNESCO and the Indian Writers and Poetry Association which then toured North America and Europe. He had attracted sizeable collector-interest and won the support of Dr Homi Bhabha; the renowned nuclear physicist who acquired several pieces for himself and the Tata Group.

It was in 1962 that my father arrived at Tilbury Docks from Bombay and soon started his search for a place. He was, by then, married and arrived ahead of my mother who followed later with a 15-month baby and a trunk-full of rolled canvases. They initially found fairly cramped lodgings in various London addresses, including bedsits in Compayne Gardens and Priory Road in the West Hampstead area. It was, however, Belsize Park that he had set his sights on.

It was in July 1964 that he found what would become their first real home and his studio. It was a cavernous, light-filled flat occupying the first floor of a white semi-detached Victorian house at 41 Belsize Park Gardens (fig. 22) and it would be the home that I would grow up in. The front of the house looked out onto a tree-lined quiet street with little traffic. Dad would occasionally carry paintings down to photograph them on the steps of the building outside, usually enlisting a family member to help.

While juggling a number of local exhibitions at Hampstead and West End venues during these first London years, his studio became an intense hive of activity.

Fig. 21 Belsize Park Gardens studio, 1966–67, Ribeiro Archive.

Fig. 22 Belsize Park studio, 1968, Ribeiro Archive.

It was located at the rear of the house with a sizeable balcony that looked out onto the lush foliage of a string of back gardens. The sheer size of the roomwhich we always referred to as ‘The Studio’ – had, I recalled, a certain ambiance, peace and quality of light.

Well before I was born, Dad’s ‘artistic chapters’ had undergone multiple transformations and so I grew up with many of his most experimental pieces. His early compositional style, when he had first started painting in India, had had a distinctly ‘structural and linear aspect’, a stained-glass effect his reviewers picked up on; most of which I only saw after unwrapping them from their packaging after his death.

His first paintings were predominantly dark works in oil, complemented by numerous and almost frenzied improvised ink drawings of townscapes, heads and the occasional still life. Explaining that one of the first influences was ‘the Catholic Church in Goa along with the symbolic ritual that went with it’, it was unsurprising that his ‘Heads’ were of archetypal Monks, Cardinals, Priests and Saints. Dotted around the studio were also various relics he had brought back from Goa; polychrome wood and ivory statues of Saints and Apostles and various wood carvings that lined our mantlepiece and clearly were memories from home.

It was from the early sixties onwards that a gentle fluidity started to enter his pieces. The solid structural outlines of the past dissolved although the familiar basilicas and architectural forms of his earlier work were still there. The tools of his studio seamlessly reflected that shift along with it. It was work like this that adorned our walls.

The initial catalyst for the change in his work seemed to have come from different directions. Commercially, he was thriving and finding his small townscapes popular with buyers. Sales’ receipts from places such as the Piccadilly Gallery, Crane Kalman Gallery and Nicholas Treadwell’s fleet of Mobile Art Galleries, which were all buzzing in the sixties, attested to that fact. He was also under pressure to ramp up his output and so the slow drying times of conventional oil paints were proving to be a hindrance. My father’s close friend and long-time patron, Professor Patrick Boylan, had interviewed him about this period, and gleaned that the current that would trigger a highly experimental chapter, was the fact that traditional painting techniques had ‘begun to wear thin on this restless young painter.’

Hearing about Polyvinyl Acetates (PVA), my father spotted an opportunity in new forms of plasticized PVA which were just coming onto the market for commercial paints.

In 1963, he had a burst of energy fueled by a curiosity about the product and started corresponding with fourteen different UK manufacturing companies of PVA products - including ICI - querying the technical performance, chemistry and complexities of several of their synthetic resins and adhesives as well as their copolymer emulsions and thickeners.

In a few words scribbled in pencil on the backs of letters, I found the essence of his three requirements. They would have to have a 16- to 24-hour drying time; be chemically compatible with water-dissolvent dyes; and, finally, possess the ability to ‘hold’ oil paint. He eventually secured a 22-gallon drum which, to me as a child, not only seemed to dominate the studio, but its liquid volume never seemed to change when I was growing up.

Patrick was told there were ‘several hundred’ experiments on hardboard, plywood, canvas and paper using PVA at different rates of plasticity.

In its unadulterated state, PVA was a clear polymer which Dad started to infuse with high strength colour dyes which were typically sold in bulk to carpet and fabric industries. He had directly sourced these from the Pigments Division of Geigy U.K. Limited who - intrigued by his experiments with their products –wrote to say, ‘We can supply you with any samples of our pigments in the future’. Their dye samples only came in miniature ‘tenth of a pint-sized’ bottles which still sit on my shelves.

Fig. 23 Materials in Belsize Park studio 1971 Ribeiro Archive.

His experiments triggered an explosive output of works radically distinct from his earlier pieces. His new paintings were ablaze with light and colour and filled the studio. He was also painting on strikingly large canvases and by the end of the decade several of these were too large to store unrolled or hang on our walls, only for me to discover long after his death. There were landscapes evoking enchanted lands, heads from his Psychedelic Man Series (cat. 8), which combined both beauty and gore and geometric abstract compositions. Several hung from our walls, giving the place a gallery feel. It was Dad’s way of finding storage solutions and maximizing floor space in whatever way he could.

I still also have the large PVA container in storage although, if ever disturbed from its place, it emits a powerful vinegary scent revealing that its contents have now degraded sixty years on. Furthermore, the container has threatened to leak and would do so were it not for the adhesive qualities of the solution and its ability to self-seal leaking PVA at the base of the container.

During my early childhood, I had felt a certain allure to ‘the studio’. I would run my hands across the rows of glistening glass jars full of powdered oil pigments. Their deep shades of blues, earthy oranges and reds and burnt sienna drew me in. There were paint-stained plastic basins and industrial-type containers everywhere and brushes, silver palette knives mixed among used paint trays and palettes.

As a toddler, the centre of the room seemed to have a permanent mound which I used to endlessly run circles around. My sense of the room was that its dimensions were closing in with stacks of paintings leaning against the walls and lengthy rolls of canvases on the wooden floor. There were wood bars, mouldings and bits of plywood or hardboard which he would turn to some use, including the back-breaking job of making all of his own stretchers for his canvases and frames. We were well used to having to navigate our way around and I remained oblivious to obvious hazards.

Our house also bore my father’s creative streak elsewhere. He had added his touch to a sliver of wall in the main bedroom and across furniture he either salvaged and upcycled or made from scratch; even painting a magnificent townscape on the back of a tallboy, which would one day mark the perimeter of my play area. Coats of deep purple or searing yellow brought different parts of the house alive.

With my parents having separated when I was still small, I grew up with him visiting regularly. I saw the studio in Belsize Park Gardens gradually transform into a proper living-cum-dining room, but it still retained its homely gallery feel and we continued to refer to it as the studio.

Over the 1970s, Dad had moved in with Brenda Capstick – an archaeologist and the Secretary of the Museums Association. Patrick, through his museum work, knew Brenda well and recalled:

Fig. 25 Ribeiro with Pipe, Belsize Park studio, 1980, Ribeiro Archive.

Fig. 24 Veronica’s Cloth, c. 1965 Ribeiro Archive.

[H]is paintings and constructions eventually filled not only his own studio in the Egbert Street house and the walls of all the living rooms but also overflowed into hallways, landings and stairways throughout most of Brenda’s house, to her increasing exasperation1

It was in 1980, my father moved into a small attic flat at 214 Haverstock Hill, his final place for the next 30 years. The flat was bright and spacious but small. One of its best features was the large sociable kitchen which looked out onto Haverstock Hill and the Old Town Hall. I would pass it en-route to my Primary School - the Rosary – on Rosslyn Hill and he would, on most days, wave to me from his kitchen window as I walked by.

You had to climb up three flights of stairs to reach his Council flat through a nondescript blue door, which he soon painted a lush golden yellow with a pale orange streak near the base. It was a door I wish I had thought of photographing.

Together, we fixed the creaky wooden floorboards and painted the walls. I was often with him, holding a hammer or helping with sanding surfaces and would assist whenever he needed to prepare works for photography sessions or frame his pieces for exhibitions. His patience was limitless. The flat very quickly took on a unique charm as his work appeared on the walls and out for display.

His small hallway was perhaps one of the most eye-catching and welcoming, with one end displaying familiar objects from Goa. These were placed above a space -saving triangular cupboard with a pine frame on which he kept ceramics and statues – reflected into a wonderful mirror that he had specifically cut down to size.

Before long, he had crafted new furniture, including a pine table varnished with a border the colour of a rich coffee brew, which became a work surface. It stood on metal legs salvaged from a discarded table and soon painted a glossy black. A small vibrant green cabinet, each drawer painted a different colour, served a utilitarian function and is now doing the same in my home.

As I grew older, I began to appreciate the way he cared for his materials. Everything was meticulously kept and had its particular place on an increasing number of shelves that he had to put up. Somehow, he managed to store his monumental canvases there, rolled up, and had ingeniously found ways to stack his stretched paintings which had been cleared out of the spare room in Belsize Park Gardens to make it into a bedroom for me.

He had begun painting watercolours (fig. 24) in the mid-1970s while he was at Brenda’s place, a phase which would continue into the late-1980s out of necessity when he had to downsize. He frequently complained to friends how the constraints of space meant he could only work small-scale although, in a letter to Patrick Boylan, watercolours were a salvation:

Fig. 26 Ribeiro in Haverstock Hill, 1990s, Ribeiro Archive.

Fig. 27 Lance and Marsha, 1974, Ribeiro Archive.

They appeared to have become my only mode of functioning – physical limitations of space and the general upheaval from 80 onwards was something I’ve had to live down. They gave me a lot of joy, were extremely relaxing and [perhaps] levitational. I feel sure they’ve helped keep me on the rails. I’ve never enjoyed doing any of my other work which has always been compulsive.2

Now within his Haverstock Hill studio, it was his boxes of watercolours, numerous brushes, bottles of varnishes and rotary ink pens that had central stage. The oils seemed to have been put away. He had also given me my own set of materials over birthdays, and I had accrued brushes, technical rotring isograph pens, compass sets, pastels and his old drawing inks – as well as my box of watercolours that matched his. He would instruct me on how to care for my materials, although before long, my own stock would inevitably reveal signs of wear, and I would have smudges and ink blots all over my hands. In contrast, his materials remained in the same condition as when first bought and the only clue that would give away their age was the browning of labels or crumbling packaging.

It was in 1987 he wrote to Patrick that ‘tanks burst during the night’. The following day a diary entry revealed ‘Tank started leaking again.’ Three days later, his diary noted ‘Picture slashed’ at his retrospective exhibition at Swiss Cottage Library just before it was due to close. In addition, water leaks from the roof, burst pipes and persistent damp - the worst possible nightmare for any artist - threw his world askew. Suddenly, large canvas rolls of oil paintings that had been so carefully maintained over 20 years were damaged. He felt his place had become a ‘dump’. Stacks of oils on paper had clumped together and it became a losing battle for him - and for me - to regain any sense of order. Damp had eaten into his work and watermarked his notes and stacks of writing. Rain would fall - drop by drop - off crumbling plasterwork steadily into buckets strategically placed around his studio. Patrick replied:

I thought I should write to confirm what I said when I saw the sad state of so many of your paintings … I can quite understand why, psychologically and artistically, you have felt that you should destroy by cutting up some of the most damaged paintings, but you should resist that temptation.3

Before long, new prospects in Germany would open up and not only revive his spirits but instigate a new chapter of large mixed media pieces on both canvas and paper. He was now using modern-day acrylic paints which he still - somewhat stubbornly – referred to as PVA. Several of these pieces were also varnished with his original stock of PVA that he had got in the sixties.

In stark contrast to his art and materials in his studio, Dad’s collection of writings was in a state of complete disarray. Strewn haphazardly across our old family dining table, everyday correspondence and junk mail intermingled with his frenzied thoughts written in pencil, poured onto the nearest available scrap of paper – regardless of whether it was blank or not. His words would occasionally appear in-between sentences of printed text, as his mind flitted from one thought to the next, often crossed out furiously or amended in a way that would later prove illegible.

This desperation to put down thoughts, before they were lost, was undoubtedly due to his ever-present fear that time - as he would put it – ‘is running out’. His papers had invaded much of the dinner table and beyond, leaving only a small area for us to sit and eat at. He would tell me what he had been working on and over leisurely drawn-out teas, unable to read his own writing, he would frequently look up and say, ‘Aghh, what does this say? I can’t make this out, can you read it to me?’ And I would dread having to squint over undecipherable words, written in fading pencil in tightly-knit converging sentences.

When it became infuriatingly difficult, I would give up in exasperation. It was pointless scolding him.

It was only after his death that I came across one diary note which revealed how he viewed the act of painting and how he resented the way it encroached on his wish to write:

I feel I should have spent the day and the night writing. But instead, began painting. When that happens there is little else I can do. There is an inner ‘noise’ when I begin to paint. I would like to stop ... I feel such a need to try and express this noise in trying to write but can’t seem to put down the simplest of things when trapped with painting.4

I often reflect, well over a decade on since he passed away, how fortunate I was to grow up in his studio surrounded by these paintings. It was the lingering scent of my childhood home in Belsize Park Gardens that – even at its most chaotic – has stayed with me and remains a powerful reminder of him and his presence to this day.

1.

2.

3.

Patrick Boylan, “Lancelot Ribeiro – The Man and his Art”, in Restless Ribeiro: An Indian Artist in Britain (Bangkok: River Books, 2013).

Lancelot Ribeiro’s draft letter to Patrick Boylan, letter dated 3 April 1986.

Patrick Boylan’s letter to Lancelot Ribeiro, letter dated 6 June 1997.

Ribeiro’s collection of thoughts in a piece he entitled ‘Calendar’, 2004.

HEADS:

Lancelot Ribeiro

(1933 Bombay (now Mumbai), India – 2010 London, England)

Immigrated to UK 1962.

All works and copyright are the estate of Lancelot Ribeiro unless otherwise specified.

1. Untitled (Crucifixion), c. 1963, Oil on paper

Ribeiro’s tiny but powerful Crucifixion, with its Black Christ figure supporting a cross foreshortened in a dramatic diagonal, recalls the wooden icons and religious adornments found in the churches and ruins of Old Portuguese Goa, near to where his family had their ancestral home. Attention is drawn to Christ’s face with the incised features evoking his agony. Ribeiro’s Catholic upbringing and education, particularly a two-year stint he endured as a boarder under the harsh regime of St Mary’s in Mount Abu (Rajasthan), had a lasting impression on him. In one undated extract from his diary, he wrote: ‘From too early an age I was troubled by “Father why hast thou forsaken me?”. Never could figure it out. The answers from others confused me even more … It was obvious that “God” or “Gods” told the others, but for a fact he never did tell me’ (cited Restless Ribeiro, 2013, p. 39).

2. Mother and Child I, 1965, Oil and dyed polyvinyl acetate on canvas

The warm palette and closeness of the two figures conveys the strong maternal bond between Ribeiro’s faceless mother and child, while the mix of oil, polyvinyl acetate and coloured dyes give an enamel-like appearance to the painting’s surface, reminiscent of a Byzantine icon. The thick black lines and semi-transparent colours create the illusion of stained glass, framed by the edges of the window.

3. Untitled (Christ with Stigmata), 1961, Oil on board

This piece was painted the year before the artist’s move to London in their Bombay family home. The stark image of a robed Christ displaying stigmata – crucifixion wounds from the nail in his hand – relate to Ribeiro’s long-standing fascination with religious imagery and its haunting impact on his work.

4. Untitled (Crowned King), 1963, Ink on paper (Vitrine)

This tiny study relates to the larger PVA untitled painting of a Crowned King and is a rare instance of where Ribeiro did a preparatory sketch for a larger piece.

5. Untitled (Crowned King), c. 1964, Oil and dyed Polyvinyl acetate on canvas

In London, Ribeiro continued to explore notions of power and corruption with a series of dramatic, monumental kings whose sharp-edged crowns relate both to his earlier townscapes and to Christ’s crown of thorns. The jagged edges also lend the work a sculptural quality, while the fiery palette used for the face, set against a black background, suggests inner turmoil.

6. King Lear, 1964, Oil on canvas, Ben Uri Collection, Presented by the Estate of Lancelot Ribeiro 2022

Ribeiro’s depiction of Shakespeare’s troubled king is one of his powerful heads. His half-brother F. N. Souza used a similarly dramatic contrast of a Black figure against a white backdrop in his Negro in Mourning (1957, Birmingham), painted at the time of London’s Notting Hill race riots. Ribeiro’s Lear was painted in 1964, the year of the British General Election, which followed the 1962 Act controlling the previous liberal postwar immigration policy, and his own response in co-founding the Indian Painters’ Collective, UK (IPC) in 1963 as an act of cultural identity. Against this backdrop, King Lear, could also be read as one of a series of self-portraits. An extract from an article on Ribeiro’s 1965 Hampstead exhibition related the following encounter: ‘Looking curiously at a painting of a man with a long, lopsided face, a distorted mouth and a strange coloured complexion, I asked the artist what it was. ‘A self-portrait’, he answered!’ (cited Restless Ribeiro, p. 30).

Ribeiro met his future wife, Ana Rita Pinto Correia, mother of their two daughters, around 1959 on Calangute Beach in Goa. They married six months later in Bombay in May 1960. R. Parthasarathy recalled: ‘Ana Rita’s family was part of the Goan – Portuguese élite. Gentle, soft – spoken, and self – effacing, Ana Rita provided the anchor that Lance badly needed. He couldn’t have chosen a better life partner’ (Restless Ribeiro, p. 12).

Painted in London, this striking portrait of Ana Rita, Expressionistic in manner, with areas of experimental colour, such as the blue lips, is the only true portrait and recognisable likeness that Ribeiro painted. He always insisted that his works, while influenced by the world around him, were essentially the products of his imagination rather than representations of reality.

7. Untitled (Portrait of Ana Rita), 1963, Oil on canvas

8. The Artist’s Torment, c. 1964, Linocut print, with pen, inks and traces of oil and PVA possibly on paper

In the mid-1960s, Ribeiro experimented with both heads and townscapes, as well as situating heads in relation to time and space. The Artist’s Torment, perhaps a form of self-portrait, with piercing eyes and broken teeth and the coloured figure against a dark backdrop, recalls his larger dramatic heads, while the shape of the head with its broad brow and pointed chin resembles a carved wooden mask. Another iteration, Drawn Head I (1960–65), is in the collection of Leicester Museum & Art Gallery.

9. Beastly & Beautiful (Psychedelic Man Series), 1964, Oil and dyed polyvinyl acetate on oil-based canvas

Ribeiro’s experiments in the 1960s with the new synthetic plastic bases then being introduced for commercial paints saw a new fluidity, speed and fluency in his work, including in his explorations of semi-abstract heads. Often large in scale, sometimes drawing on the imagery of the Catholic Church or referencing the horror of the Vietnam War, these works are firmly rooted in time - in the 1960s. Among them is his Psychedelic Man Series, including the faceless form in Beastly & Beautiful, also known as Beat Poet (The Bard).

10. Paranoid, 1965, Oil on dyed PVAbased canvas

R. D. Laing’s pioneering study of schizophrenia, The Divided Self (1955) became increasingly influential during the 1960s. Ribeiro’s split head with its shattered eyes – one pupil dilated – joined by a blank mouth, open as if to call out or scream but revealing only a void, presents one such divided self. Encapsulating the experience of paranoia: anxiety, fear and distrust, the fragmenting of the self, it suggests the darker side of the ‘swinging sixties’ drug culture. Yet the tuber-like tentacles or plant forms that surround and unite the two sides of the head, perhaps undercut the anxiety. Shaped like inverted lungs, they infuse the work with a sense of natural, organic life forms echoed in the surrounding elements.

Ribeiro’s longtime friend and fellow poet R. Parthasarathy reflected: ‘the true subject of Lance’s paintings is, I believe, origins – Goan roots, estrangement from India, and exile in London. How does a human being come to terms with multiple histories and in the process achieve wholeness?’ (Restless Ribeiro, 2013, p. 14). This search for wholeness, and the fragmenting of the self, evident in this work, perhaps also references the divisions caused by British colonial rule and India’s subsequent Partition, as well as the alienating experience of exile.

11. Untitled (Green Head), c. 1965, Dyed PVA on canvas

Ribeiro utilises thick, flowing black lines to delineate a figure emerging from a green background. The combination of black and white (particularly in the face) is reminiscent of an x-ray.

PVA, at different rates of plasticity through being mixed with oil, enabled Ribeiro to work with greater speed and fluency, and his heads and figures at times seem to float on tentacles, or to be covered in melting wax or ambiguous plant forms, incorporating fantasy and surreal elements, as in the Pink Queen, the placing of whose figure and elaborate costume suggests a queen on a giant playing card. Unlike his kings, Ribeiro’s queen, with a smaller, less spiky crown, is not restricted solely to a head, nor characterised by distorted features or an enlarged, open mouth, but instead associated with the flowing, organic forms of her dress, in a palette of pinks and purples. In the background, a castle turret references the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with townscapes.

Ribeiro’s title also evokes Lewis Carroll’s mischievous Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass (the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), anticipating Alice’s importance as a symbol of freedom and vehicle for experimentation in sixties visual (counter) culture from Jonathan Miller to Ralph Steadman, Salvador Dali and Peter Blake, among others.

The spiked, feathered edges of the hatched lines that form the untitled head relate to the spiky crowns and townscapes that feature in Ribeiro’s work of this period.

Hatched lines, and the suggestion of a crown, or crown of thorns, are once again present in Ribeiro’s ink and colour wash drawing combining figure and townscape. The hatching around the face echoes the lines delineating the buildings and the landscape, with its fields and trees, and churches in the distance. The figure in the foreground, with abstracted mouth and teeth, and oval droplets, like tears, beneath the eyes, draws attention to the sense of an individual at once situated within a landscape and simultaneously displaced from it.

12. Pink Queen, 1965, Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas

13. Untitled (Head), 1962, Ink on paper

14. Landscape (Townscape and Figure), 1965, Ink and colour wash on paper

15. Untitled (Graphic Art), 1965, Oil and polyvinyl acetate on paper

In this untitled graphic piece, abstracted heads and both circular and geometric forms emerge from a detailed pattern as design meets landscape merging into one. Ribeiro has also, playfully, hidden his name and date of the piece within the composition. The decorative motifs are richly connotative of stitched, spun or woven Indian textiles.

16. Witness the Signing and the Design, 1997, Acrylic, PVA, crayon and collage on paper

A head is present here in the outline of a figure. The bold collage of his signature across the bottom of his 1997 work, an unusual intervention among these works, brings figure, composition and the identity of the artist –who began his career as a poet – together, bearing witness to the now and to history.

17. Seeing Through, 1989, Acrylic, PVA, crayon and collage on paper

Following Ribeiro’s first solo show in Germany at Galerie Henke in Marburg, in April 1989, one review observed: ‘...you find in his paintings heads and cities that are inseparable from one another, and part of modern industrial landscapes. He is as uncritical as his images are critical. His work is intuitive, although the composition and colouring is well thought out.’ (cited Buckman, Lancelot Ribeiro, 2013, p. 129).

The prominent eye in Seeing Through appears to merge with, or emerge from, the shapes forming the backgrounds beyond. Hints of the modern industrial landscape can be found in Seeing Through, in elements that suggest the sun or moon, while architectural blocks and semi – transparent colours recall a scene glimpsed through a window.

18. The Flowering of Man, 1998, Acrylic, PVA and collage on paper

The organic plant elements and fluid lines of Ribeiro’s earlier works are taken further in his late works: the blooming of delicate flowers and bold colourful splashes of paint over the white outlines of heads, suggest the merging of human and natural forms. Katriana Hazell has suggested a connection between the artist’s interest in the spiritual practice of Tantra and the relationship with his ‘faceless faces’. Ribeiro described Tantra as ‘an evolving system, the study of which has led the conscious mind through stages to a point of total acquiescence and negation of the self.’ In 1972, he wrote that ‘he had fully achieved a kind of faceless, self-effacing form’ (cited Restless Ribeiro, 2013, p. 87). Over 25 years later, he was still experimenting with heads, shapes and their dissolution, the intensity and expressive power achieved by uses of colour, and the interplay between human and natural forms. As one reviewer observed, ‘His newest pieces … are painted collages, contrasting colours and contrasting forms, and it is only when you see them as a whole, the overall composition merges into one.’ (cited Buckman, p. 129).

A review of a 1994 show noted how Ribeiro ‘develops his work through an interplay between the search for shape and its dissolution … Colour and style are central to their intense effects, and it is exactly in this intensity that the secret of this enormous expressive power lies’ (cited Buckman, p. 138). His titles over this period, reflected in his writings, increasingly sought to comment on the state of mankind; evoking themes of emptiness, chaos and despair.

After 1989, Ribeiro exhibited frequently in Germany, with solo shows in Marburg and Frankfurt the same year. The River Main, running through Frankfurt, may have inspired this work. The head of a woman, seen in profile in the lower left of the picture resembles a Madonna, her facial features merely sketched in, she merges into the bold blue background containing traces of the sky and an urban landscape. From a distance, her head covering suggests an arching form, like a dolphin rising from the water. With the returns to and complete reworking of an earlier religious motif, the artist brings his work full circle.

20. Rising from the Banks of Main, c. 1989, Acrylic, oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas

19. HEAD – In the Abundance of Nothing, 1998, Acrylic, PVA and collage on paper

HEADS:

from the Ben Uri Collection

21. Moich Abrahams (b. 1941 Herts, England), Self-portrait, 2008, Mixed media on canvas, 141.5 x 115.5 cm, On long-term loan to Ben Uri Collection © The artist

Abrahams’ work is informed by his enthusiasm for Chagall, Picasso, and Miro, and his ongoing interest in “Outsider Art” (Art Brut). He has observed that he enjoys ‘combining spontaneity and playfulness with exploring deeper aspects of the unconscious. […] fascinated with both unwrapping the mysterious and reinventing child-like expressiveness. Central to this process is the art of “letting go”’.

Many of these qualities are brought to play in this monumental self-portrait with its bold red, white and blue palette and areas of Sgraffito (the process of scratching through a surface to reveal the colours underneath). The message ‘Goes Quick’ written or tattooed onto the upraised arms suggests the transience of life.

22. Jack Bilbo (né Hugo Baruch, 1907 Berlin, Germany – 1967 Berlin, Germany), Miriam, 1963, Gouache on paper, 46.7 x 35 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by Merry Kerr-Woodeson 1987 © The Estate of Jack Bilbo

Immigrated to UK 1936, returned Germany 1956

Bilbo’s portrait of Miriam depicts her close up and head on, her features and complexion picked out in a typically bright, non-naturalistic palette that seems to reflect the prevalent trends of 1960s’ culture, as well as the artist’s own ebullient personality. Self-taught as an artist, Bilbo did not adhere to any specific movement or formal artistic style but was influenced by Surrealism and frequently depicted bizarre, erotic and sometimes grotesque themes.

23. Lom (né Alfred Lomnitz, 1892 Hessen, Germany – 1953 London, England), Woman Seated at a Table, Paint and collage on Newspaper, c. 1934, 44 x 30 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by Cyril J. Ross 1954

Immigrated to UK 1933

Graphic artist Lom’s incorporates a printed image from the Evening Standard newspaper into the painted head of his Woman Seated at a Table, surrounded by still life elements including a collaged ‘Vidor’ battery box. His experimental repurposing of his painting’s support, re-using The Evening Standard newspaper, dates to 1934, the year that he migrated to Britain, and also reflecting a resourcefulness common to his ‘Hitler émigré’ cohort.

24. Gerald Marks (1912 London, England – 2018 London, England), Emerging Image, 1962, Oil on canvas, 102 x 76 cm, Ben Uri Collection, purchased 1962 © The Estate of Gerald Marks

The head and shoulders of a figure denoted by a patchwork of colours emerges from the background of Gerald Marks’ painting, fusing his earlier figurative, social realist works (in line with his Communist beliefs) with his later, large-scale, non-political abstracts. It was painted in the same year that Marks held a solo show of abstract paintings at Polish émigrée Halima Nalecz’s Drian Gallery.

25. Isaac Dobrinsky (1891 Makarov, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) –1973 Paris, France) Head of a Girl, c. 1945, Oil on board, 33 x 27 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by Mrs Goldstein, 1945 © The Estate of Isaac Dobrinsky

Immigrated to France 1912

The closed mouth and fixed stare of Dobrinsky’s young girl appear to express disenchantment perhaps with the harshness of life, in contrast to the light, luminous palette and lively brushstrokes used to depict her. In the 1950s Dobrinsky worked at the Chateau de Chabannes, Limousin, which cared for children orphaned by the Nazis, where he painted numerous portraits of the staff and children. This portrait predates but seems to anticipate this appointment.

26. Dodo (née Dörte Bürgner, 1907 Berlin, Germany – 1998 London, England, Verkündigung (Annunciation), 1933, Watercolour and pencil on paper, 56 x 42 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by the Dodo Estate, Athens, 2012 © The Dodo Estate, Athens

Immigrated to UK 1936

German-Jewish emigrée Dodo’s powerful self-portrait was painted in 1933, the year that Adolf Hitler acceded to the German Chancellorship. It was also the year that the artist underwent Jungian analysis in Zurich, resulting in an outpouring of hallucinatory images exploring guilt, alienation and separation. She portrays herself spotlighted in a shaft of light associated with the Christian Annunciation, although her tears suggest grief and anxiety, possibly due in part to her troubled marriage. Her stylised features relate both to her work as a fashion illustrator in the Weimar Republic and to her awareness of German Expressionism, as she depicts herself against a backdrop of European modernist architecture.

27. Paul Richards (b. 1949 England – Lives England) Portrait of Anthony, c. 2016, Pen and ink on paper, 30 x 30 cm, Ben Uri Collection, Presented by the artist 2016, courtesy of Connaught Brown © The Artist

Portrait of Anthony depicts Connaught Brown gallery director Anthony Brown and belongs to Richards’ celebrated ‘Oxford Drawings’ series of psychologically charged human figures, animals and birds. Using an expressionist style, he explores the human form, employing a series of lines and gestural marks inspired by Rembrandt’s ink drawings and Old Master drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, limiting his materials to pen and ink and water in order to get ‘as close to the subject as possible’. Working increasingly from memory, these searching drawings reveal the emotional connection between the artist and his sitters.

28. Susanna Jacobs (1966 London, England – Lives London, England) Portrait of Catherine Eastman, 1993, Drypoint on paper, 22.5 x 17.5 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by the artist 1994 © The Artist

Jacobs’ portrait etching plays upon the process and technique of drypoint, in which the incised line has a slightly raised, uneven, rough edge, known as the burr, which receives the ink when the plate is wiped, giving it a characteristic appearance. The artist has used these lines to reflect the contours of her sitter’s face with more deeply etched lines around one eye and the cheekbone, nose and mouth to create character and expression.

29. Alfred Daniels (1924 London, England – 2015 London, England) Self-portrait, Pen and ink and white paint on paper and board, 35 x 26.5 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by Charles Spencer 2002 © The Estate of Alfred Daniels

Early in his career, Daniels taught himself the art of illustration and to retouch photographs while working at his uncle’s commercial studio. His self-portrait uses pen and ink and white paint on paper to invoke a number of artistic processes and techniques: the monochrome colouring suggests a black-and-white photograph, but the worked surface also helps to create the illusion of a woodcut, and the chalky white surface points to his practice as a mural painter.

30. Unknown Artist, Head of a Man, Charcoal on paper, 46 x 39 cm, Ben Uri Collection

This beautifully executed charcoal head of an unknown Black man by an unidentified artist was probably executed mid-twentieth century, reflecting the dominant naturalistic trend in portraiture.

31. Alfred Harris (b. 1930 London, England – Lives London, England) Notes Towards a Self Portrait: Check Shirt, 2011, Oil and charcoal on canvas, 53.5 x 42.5 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by the artist 2011 © The Artist

The artist’s head and shoulders fill the frame. Areas of pure, vivid red and green wash over the head and half the face, while the application of charcoal in both lines and patches builds up and gives definition to the face and the body, adding weight and bulk. Harris’ ongoing series of searching self-portrait ‘studies’, including both paintings and drawings, has been at the centre of his practice for more than 20 years.

32. Eugen Hersch (1887 Berlin, Germany – 1967 London, England) Self-portrait sketch, Oil on canvas on board, 39 x 35 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by John Denham 1991 © The Estate of Eugen Hersch

Immigrated to UK 1939

Hersch’s bold, Expressionist selfportrait sketch, with its searching expression, is a conscious act of self-scrutiny and an unflinching examination of the process of ageing. Thinned washes of paint are deftly applied to indicate the lines and contours of the artist’s face, which is held in an attitude of tense concentration. The restrained palette - the only touch of colour is the red applied to the ear - underlines the artist’s gaunt, ascetic appearance.

33. Bruno Simon (1913 Vienna, Austria – 1999 Bergamot, Italy) Chinese Girl (aka Head of a Girl), 1946, Terracotta, 22.5 x 14 x 17 cm, Ben Uri Collection, Purchased 1952 © The Estate of Bruno Simon

Lived UK 1939–40, 1949–66

One of a pair of sculptures created in Australia in 1946, revealing divergent parts of the artist’s practice: Chinese Girl (aka Head of a Girl), praised for its ‘sensitive direct modelling’ (Jewish Chronicle), shows a modernist simplification of form, while its companion piece, David (aka Head of a Boy) is classical in style.

A ‘Hitler émigré’, interned as a so-called ‘enemy alien’ in an Australian Commonwealth camp during the Second World War, Simon initially remained in Australia afterwards. He entered both works for the 1948 Wynne Prize for art in New South Wales, for which he was a finalist, before bringing them to England in 1949 and exhibiting them at Ben Uri Gallery.

34. Mosheh Oved (né Edward Goodack, Skepe, Russian Empire (now Poland) 1885 – 1958 London, England) The Winged Human, 1946–48, Bronze, 38 x 28 x 18 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented in honour of the Mamlok family 2015 © The Estate of Mosheh Oved

Immigrated to UK 1903

Oved’s highly individual works with their esoteric titles express his ‘fantasies and visions through the medium of sculpture’. Both heads are part of a group of 16 bronzes he exhibited under the title ‘Sculptural Expressions’ at Viennese émigrée Lea Bondi Jaray St George’s Gallery in 1948. A writer, jeweller and owner of the famous shop, Cameo Corner, as well as one of Ben Uri’s founders, Oved began modelling with his hands while sheltering from bombs during the Second World War.

35. Mosheh Oved ((né Edward Goodack, Skepe, Russian Empire (now Poland) 1885 – 1958 London, England)Vision, 1946-48, Bronze, 35 x 20 x 16 cm, presented in honour of the Mamlok family 2015 © The Estate of Mosheh Oved

Immigrated to UK 1903

36. Oscar Nemon (né Oskar Neumann, 1906 Osijek, Austria-Hungary (now Croatia) – 1985 Oxford, England), Sir Winston Churchill, 1950s, 12.5 x 10 x 10 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by Monica Bohm Duchen, on behalf of herself and the late Dorothy Bohm 2024 © The Estate of Oscar Nemon

Immigrated to UK 1938

Croatian sculptor Oscar Nemon first met British statesman, soldier and writer, Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965), UK Prime Minister from 1940–45 and 1951–55, at La Mamounia Hotel in Marrakech in 1951. His unofficial sketch of Churchill, observed in the dining room, gained Lady Churchill’s approval, leading to official commissions for Churchill sculptures, including one for Windsor Castle from Queen Elizabeth II in her coronation year.

Nemon was Churchill’s favourite sculptor, invited to his Chartwell and London homes; he was also the subject of a unique reciprocal sculpture by Churchill, made during one of their sittings. Privately, Nemon recorded Churchill’s ‘bellicose, challenging, and deliberately provocative’ character, aiming to capture in his sculptures ‘not merely a likeness, but a biography of his life’. This piece, from the 1950s, is a miniature painted resin version of one of Nemon’s Churchill portraits, produced by the Nemon estate.

37. Sarah Lightman (b. 1975 London, England), It’s Ok, 2006, Graphite on paper, 29 x 20.5 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by the artist 2006 © The Artist

Sarah Lightman has observed: ‘For me art is an emotional and technical narrative, drawing and writing, how I’m feeling, while teasing the viewer’s assumptions.’ She has developed a distinctive style as a graphic artist across a range of practices from drawing to comics, animation and painting, often placing herself and her life at the centre of the work and drawing on and returning to autobiographical motifs and narratives.

38. David Breuer-Weil (1965 London, England – Lives London, England) Head, 2000, Oil on canvas, 83 x 88 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by the artist 2001 © The Artist

The viewer looks down into the interior of a man’s head to be confronted by a series of repeating heads wound in concentric circles, evoking ideas of interiority and the multiple selves within us all. The rich palette and expressive brushstrokes suggest warmth and emotion.

39. David Breuer-Weil (1965 London, England – Lives London, England) Maquette for Visitor, 2010, Bronze with brown patina, 18 x 17 x 23 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented by the artist 2010 © The Artist

Maquette for Visitor is the working model for the artist’s monumental head, Visitor I, exhibited at Chatsworth in 2010. Its tactile surface reveals his fingerprints greatly enlarged to imply ‘that a higher power has constructed and placed this unearthly figure in this suffocated position’. It relates closely to Breuer-Weil’s Philosopher paintings, which also feature a large head. Of these works, the artist has stated that he wanted to express ‘the immense potential power of thought … This work is a visual embodiment of thought. Every human being is largely hidden and secret.’

40. Albert Abramovitz (1879 Riga, Russian Empire (now Latvia) – 1963 East Meadow, New York, USA) Portrait of a Woman, c. 1933, Woodcut on paper, 18.5 x W 13.5 cm, Ben Uri Collection, purchased 1933 © The Estate of Albert Abramovitz

Immigrated to USA 1916

A seated African American woman sleeps in a spartan interior, possibly a kitchen, apparently resting from her labours. In the lower part of the picture, one hand rests on an unseen table, while the other, cupped to follow the curve of her cheek, supports her head. At the same time, the vertical angle of her wrist also suggests that she may be holding a pestle and mortar.

Abramovitz immigrated to the USA in 1916 and by the 1930s was living in Brooklyn, an area with a substantial, historic African American community. His graphic work often reflects social or political issues, and this woodcut was made during an era of racial segregation.

41. Frank Auerbach (b.1931 Berlin, Germany – 2024 London, England) Michael, 1990, Etching on paper, artist’s proof outside the published edition of 50, Ben Uri Collection, Presented by the artist 1994

Immigrated to UK 1939

Second-generation German-Polish Jewish immigrant art historian Michael Podro (Michael Isaac Podrushnik, 1931–2008), studied part-time at the Slade School of Fine Art, before changing direction, inspired by the lectures of émigré art historian E. H. Gombrich. In 1961 Podro became Head of Art History at Camberwell School of Art, where he befriended Frank Auerbach and R. B. Kitaj, then employed as part-time tutors.

This print is part of a series of etchings of Auerbach’s friends and family, entitled ‘Seven Portraits’, made with a Japanese screwdriver bought from his local Woolworth’s. The darker areas of the head have been longer exposed to acid in the etching process. Made to accompany the deluxe edition of Robert Hughes’ Frank Auerbach monograph in 1990, they were printed by Marc Balakjian (1938-2017), at Studio Prints.

42. Hormazd Nariewalla (b. 1979 Mumbai, India – Lives London, England), Bands of Pride, 2017, 2 panels from 6 panel mixed media works-on-paper collage, (each panel) 53.5 x 37.5 cm, presented by the artist 2018 © The Artist

Immigrated to UK 2003

Bands of Pride was originally commissioned by the Migration Museum, London for the exhibition No Turning Back: Seven Migration Moments that Changed Britain (2018). Using family photographs supplied by Narielwalla’s Jewish friends, this collage explores the racist policies enacted against Jews under Edward I in England (including the wearing of yellow), leading to their expulsion in 1290. The blue colour palette was chosen to reflect the Blue City, Chefchaouen in Morocco, where Jewish settlers painted their houses in many shades of blue. The artist’s palette reflects this ‘to celebrate Jewish culture and contributions’.

43. Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin (né Samuel Rahamin Samuel, 1880 Poone, India (1965 London, England – 1964 Karachi, Pakistan) Portrait of Rosalind Adler, c. 1906, Oil on canvas, 125.6 x 84.7 cm, Ben Uri Collection, presented.

Studied UK 1903–07

Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin’s portrait of Rosalind Adler, was almost certainly a commission executed during his scholarship years in London at the Royal Academy under John S. Sargent and Solomon J. Solomon, between 1903 and 1907. Their influence can be seen in the naturalism and loose brushwork of this classic Edwardian portrait, clearly belonging to the Western tradition, and a rare example of his early work.

By 1908 Samuel had returned to India and abandoned naturalism, adopting the two-dimensional figuration traditionally associated with Rajput painting, a strand of the Bengal school. His critically acclaimed paintings in this latter style, exhibited in London, Paris and New York, were signed with his chosen name, Samuel Fyzee-Rahamin, which he adopted after converting to Islam prior to his marriage in 1912.

Ribeiro Timeline

1933: Born in Bombay (now Mumbai) as Lanceloté José Belarmino Ribeiro.

1939-42: Ribeiro attends St Xavier’s School in Bombay – a strong Catholic school run by Jesuit priests.

1942: Ribeiro’s mother, Lília, transfers Ribeiro to St Mary’s (Senior Cambridge School), a boarding school in Mount Abu, Rajputana.

1946: Ribeiro returns to Bombay and enrols in St Xavier’s High School.

1947: India secures Independence from Britain, creating the Partition between two new independent dominions: India and Pakistan.

1950: Ribeiro completes his high school education at St Xavier’s High School and travels to England on the P&O SS Mooltan to study accountancy. He initially lodges with his artist brother, Francis Newton (F.N.) Souza, in London.

1951: Ribeiro secures accommodation at the International Language Club in East Croydon while studying for accountancy exams.

1951-53: Ribeiro studies life drawing part-time at Saint Martin’s School of Art, London.

1954: Ribeiro travels extensively around continental Europe, primarily to avoid conscription. He starts experimenting with jewellery making and design.

1954-55: Ribeiro is caught on a trip back from Paris by military police and conscripted into National Service in the Royal Air Force, stationed in West Kirby (Merseyside), Catterick (North Yorkshire) and Dumfries, Scotland. He is enlisted into the RAF campaign to eradicate the highly-infectious myxomatosis outbreak in rabbits.

1955: In the midst of an escalating political climate, and the threat of a stint in Egypt, Ribeiro secures his discharge from the RAF with the intervention of Souza and V K Krishna Menon (India’s first High Commissioner in London from the newly independent India). He returns to India and works with the Life Insurance Corporation in Bombay, while writing poetry and painting.

1958: Ribeiro starts painting professionally – producing his first paintings: a number of townscapes on paper.

1960: Ribeiro marries Ana Rita Pinto Correia in Bombay.

Fig. 29 Passport, issued in August 1950

1961: Ribeiro’s first one-man exhibition at Bombay Artist Aid Centre is a sell-out. He is commissioned by J.R.D. Tata to paint a 12-foot mural titled Urban Landscape for Tata Iron and Steel, Bombay. Meanwhile, he gives poetry readings sponsored by the British Council and the Bombay English Association, alongside fellow poets Nissim Ezekiel, R. Parthasarathy and Manuel Rodrigues. He exhibits at ‘Ten Indian Painters which tours several cities across India and Europe and North America.

1962: Ribeiro settles permanently in England, ‘rushing’ before the introduction of Commonwealth Immigration Controls. He is awarded a grant from the Congrès pour la Liberté de la Culture [Congress for Cultural Freedom], Paris. He is nominated for All India Gold Medal.

1963: Ana Rita Pinto Correia follows Ribeiro to England with their young daughter, arriving at Tilbury Docks with probably only £5 (the maximum allowed by the British authorities).

Ribeiro is a founder member of the Indian Painters Collective, UK with Gajanan D Bhagwat, Yashwant Mali, and Ibrahim Wagh, all Indian painters living in the UK - the collective later expanding to seven members with the addition of L. B. Chavan, Balraj Khanna, S. V. Rama Rao.

1964-71: Following a tense general election campaign in 1964, Commonwealth Immigration Controls are tightened in 1968 and 1971, forming a hostile and discriminatory background to Ribeiro’s early years in London.

November 1964: IPC mounts the exhibition Six Indian Painters at India House, Aldwych, London.

1964-1965: Salman Haidar of the Indian High Commission commissions two sets of graphic art pieces by Ribeiro as the covers for the 1964 and 1965 India Annual Reviews. Exhibitions in London are held in leading West End galleries including Piccadilly, Crane Kalman, Rawinsky, and Mount Galleries, as well as Nicholas Treadwell’s Mobile Art Galleries, which took double-decker buses and vans into Britain’s suburbs to potential customers.

1972: Ribeiro lectures on Indian art and culture as well as his own artistic practice for the Commonwealth Institute, UK.

1976: Ribeiro is a founder member of the multicultural Rainbow Art Group.

1978: The Indian Painters Collective is revived as the Indian Artists Collective, later becoming Indian Artists UK (IAUK). IAUK holds ‘Four Leading Indian Artists’ exhibition at India House in London.

1979: IAUK secures a private exhibition at the residence of the Indian High Commissioner.

1980: The first exhibition by IAUK is mounted at Burgh House & Hampstead Museum. Ribeiro leaves IAUK. Ribeiro moves into a smaller flat, impacting his studio space, and leading to a period of small-scale, predominantly watercolour works, inspired by the English countryside.

1982: IAUK’s ‘Between Two Cultures’ exhibition is held at the Barbican, as part of the Festival of India.

1985: Ribeiro is the victim of a racially motivated attack outside Hampstead Police Station, suffering a head injury that leaves him hospitalised.

1986: Ribeiro’s first major exhibition is held at the Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery. It then tours to Swiss Cottage Library; in the last few days, one of his paintings is slashed.

1987: Ribeiro suffers a heart attack. In the studio “tanks burst during the night”, causing significant water damage to some of his early classic oil paintings on paper.

1989: Ribeiro is excluded from Hayward Gallery’s ‘The Other Story’, despite his brother, Souza, writing to the organisers in 1988 to assert that he should in fact be included with other ‘non-white’ artists. Ribeiro starts exhibiting extensively in Germany, unveiling new large paintings, many of which are of heads and figures, utilising modern-day acrylics and his old stock of PVA.

1998: Ribeiro returns to India for a one-man show in Delhi.

2010: After a long absence, Ribeiro displays a single painting at the British Art Fair. Lancelot Ribeiro dies on Christmas Day in his attic flat in London, England.

2013: Restless Ribeiro, a retrospective, is held at Asia House, London

2017: HLF-Funded project, entitled Retracing Ribeiro, is held in London. It includes an exhibition at Hampstead’s Burgh House Museum, and events such as ‘Remembering Lancelot Ribeiro and other Indian artists in 1960s Britain’ at the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum’s ‘Ribeiro: A Celebration of Life, Love and Passion’.

2019: Ribeiro’s oil and PVA painting Townscape (1964) wins Art Fund Support.

2024: Ben Uri exhibition Heads – In and Out of Time, borrowing its title from the artist’s own long-planned but unrealised idea for an exhibition, focuses on his preoccupation with portraiture and imagined heads.

Fig. 28 SS MOOLTAN, sailing between 1923 and 1954

Exhibitions

1961 Bombay Artist Aid Centre, Bombay

Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay

1962 Kunika Art Centre, New Delhi

Roopa Art Gallery, Bombay

Ashoka Art Gallery, Calcutta

Max Mueller Bhawan, New Delhi

1963 Rawinski Gallery, London

1965 Everyman Cinema Foyer Gallery, London

1967 Economist Intelligence, London

1969 Instituto Menezes-Braganza, Goa

Indo-German Association, Goa

1970 Deson-Zaks Gallery, Chicago

1971 Triangle Gallery, San Francisco

1973 University of Sussex, School of African and Asian Studies, Brighton

1974 Margaret Fisher, London

1978 Abbot Hall Art Gallery and Museum, Kendal, Cumbria

1980 Brian O’Malley Gallery and Arts Centre, Rotherham

1984 Henny Hendler, London

1985 Ferreira Gomes, London

Carol Conrich, London

1986 Swiss Cottage Library, Camden, London (Retrospective, 1960-86)

Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester (Retrospective, 1960-86)

1989 Annegrete Henke Gallery, Marburg

Galerie Einbaum, Frankfurt

1991-92 Galerie Signum, Heidelberg

1994 Galerie Signum, Heidelberg

Galerie Leonhard, Basel

1996 Galerie Signum, Heidelberg

Galerie Andreas Haas, Viernheim Burgerhaus, Mannheim (shared show)

1998 LTG Art Gallery, New Delhi

Posthumous

2013 Restless Ribeiro, Asia House, London

2016-17 HLF-funded project Retracing Ribeiro holds events in London at Burgh House & Hampstead Museum, British Museum, Central Saint Martins, Camden Archives, and V&A

2018 Lancelot Ribeiro: A Voyage of Discovery, New Walk Museum, Leicester

Lancelot Ribeiro - An Artist in India and Europe, Grosvenor Gallery in association with Oberon Gallery, Leicester

2019 New Acquisitions Burgh House & Hampstead Museum

2021 Lancelot Ribeiro (1933-2010) ARTWORKS, Grosvenor Gallery, London

2023

Finding Joy in a Landscape, Burgh House & Hampstead Museum, London

Lancelot Ribeiro: An Indian Painter in Hampstead, Grosvenor Gallery at Burgh House, London

Lancelot Ribeiro, THE Park, New Delhi

2024 Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads In and Out of Our Time, Ben Uri Gallery, London

Requiem, Aicon Gallery, New York

Lancelot Ribeiro, THE Park, Hyderabad

Impulsive, Compulsive: The Art of Lancelot Ribeiro, Akara Modern, Mumbai

Group Exhibitions

1961

Ten Indian Painters, promoted by the Indian Writers Association, Madras (followed by tour of several cities in India, Europe, USA, and Canada)

Roopa Art Gallery, Bombay

Kumar Gallery, New Delhi

Ashoka Art Gallery, Calcutta

1962 Piccadilly Gallery, London

Rawinsky Gallery, London

John Whibley Gallery, London

1963

Galerie Lambert, Paris

Crane Kalman Gallery, London

Mount Gallery, London

1964

Group of Six, John Whibley Gallery, London

Hundred Painters from London, New End Gallery, London

Nicholas Treadwell Gallery, London

Six Indian Painters, Indian Painters Collective, India House, London

1965 Painters from Hampstead, Everyman Gallery, London

1966 The Arts of India, Towner Gallery, Eastbourne

1966–67 Camden Picture Loan Scheme, London

1967 Rosenthal and Treadwell, Croydon

1971 Deson-Zaks Gallery, Chicago

1973 Four Contemporary Indian Artists, Museum and Art Gallery, Brighton, The Grange, Rottingdean

1974 University of Sussex, School of African and Asian Studies, Brighton Indian Painters at the UNESCO International Art Week, Kilburn Polytechnic, London Mandeer Gallery, London

1975 Rainbow Gallery, London

1976 Five Indian Painters, Arts 38, Oxford Street, London

1977 Painters of the Gallery, Arts 38, London Indian Painting at Fenwick’s, London

1978 City and East London College, London Four Leading Indian Artists, India House, London

1979 Rainbow Art Group, Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham Indian High Commissioner’s House, London

1980 Burgh House and Hampstead Museum, London

1986 4 Glenloch Court, London (Private House)

2010 England & Co Gallery, British Art Fair, London Posthumous

2014 India Art Fair, Delhi

Lancelot Ribeiro: An Indian Artist in Europe and India, Grosvenor Gallery in association with Saffronart - Delhi, Saffronart - Mumbai, and Sunaparanta Goa Centre

2015 Grosvenor Gallery, London

2016 Modern Indian Landscapes, Bakre, Souza and Ribeiro (1950–1970), Grosvenor Gallery, London (Asian Art in London)

2017 India Art Fair, Delhi

2018 (Special event) Passport to the Motherland – Migration Dreams, V&A, London

2019 The Roots of the Indian Artists’ Collectives, Grosvenor Gallery, London

India Art Fair, Delhi

2020

South Asian Modern Art 2020, Grosvenor Gallery, London

Midnight’s Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain, online exhibition, Ben Uri Research Unit, London

2021

Shaping the Future: New Acquisitions at Ben Uri Gallery, London

India Art Fair, Delhi

South Asian Modern Art 2021, Grosvenor Gallery, London

2022

South Asian Modern Art 2022, Grosvenor Gallery, London

2023 Art, Identity, Migration: Ben Uri at the London Art Fair

India Art Fair, Lancelot Ribeiro and Sadanand Bakre, Grosvenor Gallery, India

(Special event) Exclusive Viewing at THE Park, Delhi

Madras Art Fair, Chennai

Mumbai Art Fair, Mumbai

South Asian Modern Art 2023, Grosvenor Gallery, London

Landscape & Forms: Two Indian Master Artists, Lancelot Ribeiro and Avinash Chandra, Delhi

2024

The Decorative Fair, Ben Uri at Evolution, London

Us: From There to Here, Britain’s Gain, Ben Uri Gallery, London

South Asian Modern Art 2024, Grosvenor Gallery, London

Mumbai Art Fair, 2024, Aicon Gallery, Mumbai

Works in Corporate and Public Collections

Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Cumbria; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Ben Uri Collection, London; The British Museum, London; Burgh House & Hampstead Museum, London; Leicester Museum & Art Gallery; Tata Iron and Steel, India; University of Sussex; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Tate, UK, among others.

Select bibliography

Books and articles

P. J. Boylan Lancelot Ribeiro: Paintings - A Retrospective, 1960-86 (Leicester: Leicester Museums, 1986)

David Buckman Lancelot Ribeiro: An Artist in India and Europe (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2014)

David Buckman “Lancelot Ribeiro: Artist in the Vanguard of the Influx of Indian Artists in Britain”, Obituary, Independent, 04 April 2011

“Lance Ribeiro”, Obituary, The Times, 24 January 2011

Rachel Dickson and Zehra Jumabhoy in, ed., Rachel Dickson, Midnight’s Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain (Ben Uri Research Unit, 2020), online catalogue

Katriana Hazell, Restless Ribeiro: An Indian Artist in Britain (River Books, 2013)

Sarah MacDougall and Clare Matthews, ed., Lancelot Ribeiro: Heads In and Out of Our Time (Ben Uri Research Unit, 2024)

Marsha Ribeiro, Retracing Ribeiro Education Pack (Marsha Ribeiro, 2016)

Anita Roy “Breaking Walls”, The Indian Quarterly 5:2 (2017)

Landscape and Forms: Lancelot Ribeiro, Avinash Chandra (108 Arts Project, 2023)

Lancelot Ribeiro: An Indian Painter in Hampstead (London, Grosvenor Gallery, 2023)

The Roots of Indian Artists’ Collectives (London: Grosvenor Gallery, 2019)

Selected Lectures

2024 Experiments with Vinyl Paint: Technical Analysis of Two Paintings by Lancelot Ribeiro, American Institute for Conservation, Salt Lake City

Finding an Indian Expressionist, Simon Lake

In Their Voices: The Roots of the Indian Artists Collective, Marsha Ribeiro From Bombay to Belsize, Marsha Ribeiro

2016 Remembering Lancelot Ribeiro and other Indian Artists in 1960s Britain, Nicholas Treadwell, The British Museum and Central Saint Martins, London

Ribeiro Rediscovered, David Buckman, Burgh House & Hampstead Museum; Camden Archives, London

Ribeiro: A Lifetime of Experiment - From Bombay to the V&A, David Buckman, V&A, London

Ribeiro: Music and Art - The ‘Crushed Crystal Sound of Colour’, Gerard McBurney, V&A, London

Geology and Landscape, Patrick Boylan, Yorkshire Geology and Art Conference, Cumbria

2015 Lancelot Ribeiro: An Artist in India and Europe, David Buckman, Grosvenor Gallery, Waterstones Piccadilly and Burgh House & Hampstead Museum, London

2014 Lancelot Ribeiro: An Artist in India and Europe, David Buckman, Saffronart Delhi, Saffronart Mumbai and Sunaparanta Goa Centre

2013 Memories of the Sixties, Nicholas Treadwell, Asia House, London

Ribeiro: The Man and His Art, Patrick Boylan, Asia House, London

1972 Indian Art Through the Ages, Lancelot Ribeiro, The Music & Arts of India Commonwealth Institute Conference, Devon

Portrait of an Indian Artist, Lancelot Ribeiro, The Music & Arts of India Commonwealth Institute Conference, Essex

Websites

“Artist’s Website.” https://www.lancelotribeiro.com/

Art UK “Lancelot Ribeiro: The Restless Landscapist”: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/lancelot-ribeiro-the-restless-landscapist

Art UK “Lancelot Ribeiro: The Anatomy of Three Paintings”: https://artuk.org/discover/stories/lancelot-ribeiro-the-anatomy-of-three-paintings

Ben Uri Collection: https://www.benuricollection.org.uk/intermediate.php?artistid=462

Ben Uri Research Unit: https://www.buru.org.uk/contributor/lancelot-ribeiro

“Reflection of Midnight’s Family Exhibition.” Issuu. https://issuu.com/benurigallery/docs/midnight_s_family_70_years_of_indian_ artists_in_br

Obituary.” The Independent: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/lancelot-ribeiro-artist-in-thevanguard-of-the-influx-of-indian-artists-to-britain-2261209.html

Obituary. The Times: https://www.thetimes.com/article/lance-ribeiro-xrl5d7ggpp3

Marsha Ribeiro The roots of the Indian artists’ collectives in Britian. 2019 https:// artuk.org/discover/stories/the-roots-of-the-indian-artists-collectives-in-britain

“Website of Retracing Ribeiro Project.” https://retracingribeiro.co.uk/

Recording the Refugee and Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900

Back cover: Fig. 1 Polyfoto portraits, 1950s, Ribeiro Archive.