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Signed ‘Franco’ (lower right).
Sizes:
Frame: 63 × 55 cm | 24.8 × 21.7 in
Artwork: 46 × 38 cm | 18.1 × 15 in
Seen from behind, a woman with dark hair sits on a white cloth before an oval mirror, both arms raised to her hair; a glimpse of her face returns in the glass, and a candle and bottles on the side table catch the light. The whole scene glows in browns, turquoise and flame-orange, laid on with a loaded brush.
Henrique Franco (1883–1961), born in Funchal, Madeira, was one of the pioneers of Portuguese modernism. A pensioner of the Portuguese state in Paris after the First World War, he absorbed Manet and Cézanne and exhibited with the ‘Cinco Independentes’ in Lisbon in 1923 before becoming professor at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts and one of the country’s leading fresco painters. The nude at her toilette was a subject he treated in oil throughout his mature career.
Signed ‘Franco’ at the lower right.
Private Collection, Spain.
Oil on canvas, framed. The canvas has been relined onto a new stretcher; the paint layer is stable with a lively impasto; a light varnish with minor surface dirt. Please contact us to request a detailed Condition Report.
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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.
Highlights of the Aurora & Athena autumn sale on 17 October 2026: Bridget Tichenor, Nicholas Roerich, Konstantin Korovin, Gerard Sekoto, Jan Zrzavý, Pan Yuliang, a Miró lithograph and the painters of the École de Paris.
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