Peter de Francia’s early social realist canvases, for which he remains best known today, succeed in the only measure that matters: they make eloquent to subsequent eras the suffering endured in the passing conflicts of his day. But his works in other modes share in this quality – de Francia's focus on migrants and marginalised communities feels more of our contemporary moment than his own, as does his promiscous movement between high art and low art, between the heroic and the mock heroic, the satirical and the earnest. De Francia's contribution to figurative painting in the post-war era is distinguished by many things – his political commitmedness, his cosmopolitanism – but perhaps above all by his mastery of a wide range of idioms and his nimbleness in moving between them. This was an artist who produced both gimlet-eyed depictions of the brutality exercised by the powerful and intimate depictions of workers at labour or in bucolic repose; piercingly observed portraits and figure compositions that revel in their bodily sensuality. His works have been admired and championed by figures including John Berger, R.B. Kitaj and, more recently, Dore Ashton and Geeta Kapur, and are housed in major museums worldwide, from the Tate and the British Museum to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Yale Center for British Art and the Museum of Modern Art in Prague. The works selected for this site reflect both the range and the coherence of his vision.
