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Lance RibeiroLancelot Ribeiro was born in Bombay in 1933 (his brother was the eminent Indian artist F. N. Souza) and lived in what was then the Portuguese colony of Goa on the west coast of India. Ribeiro first came to Britain in 1950 and gave up business studies to attend life-drawing classes at St Martin's School of Art from 1951 to 1953. He subsequently traveled through much of Europe before returning to Bombay in 1955, where he began painting professionally in 1959. Ribeiro moved back to London in 1962, where he has lived since. He was a founder member of the Indian Painters Collective UK in 1963 and in 1978 he founded the Indian Arts United Kingdom Group.
His earliest works were colourful, expressionist townscapes, and a series of powerful heads with an icon-like quality displaying a clear relationship to the Christian tradition. His work was an immediate success, and by 1962 he had already had six solo shows in Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta, and contributed to several group exhibitions, one of which, Ten Indian Painters, subsequently went on an extended tour of Europe (including Britain), Canada and the USA.
