Henrique Franco

Henrique Franco de Sousa was born in Funchal, Madeira, in 1883, the elder brother of the sculptor Francisco Franco. He studied at the António Augusto de Aguiar Industrial School in Funchal and at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, and went to Paris as a state pensioner, where the example of Manet and Cézanne turned him away from naturalism towards flat colour and simplified volume.

In 1923 he took part in the exhibition of the ‘Cinco Independentes’ in Lisbon — with his brother Francisco, Dordio Gomes, Diogo de Macedo and Alfredo Miguéis — one of the founding moments of Portuguese modernism.

Franco became professor at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts and one of the country’s leading mural painters: the frescoes of the Casa da Moeda (1936) and of the church of Nossa Senhora de Fátima in Lisbon (1938), a landmark of Portuguese modern art, are his. His easel paintings — portraits, nudes, still lifes and Madeiran landscapes — combine a decorative simplicity with a rich, warm palette.

He won numerous prizes and is represented in the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea do Chiado and in the Henrique and Francisco Franco Museum in Funchal, devoted to the two brothers. He died in Coimbra in 1961.