Greyhounds

Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and the Painter Everyone Slept On

For most of the twentieth century, almost nobody outside Portugal had heard of Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso. He'd left his family's wine country home in northern Portugal as a young man, moved to Paris in 1906, and within a few years was sharing ideas and studios with Modigliani, Brâncuși and Robert Delaunay. He painted 'Greyhounds' around 1911, right in the middle of all that creative noise. Several of his works were sent to the famous Armory Show in New York in 1913, hanging in the same rooms as Picasso and Duchamp, and they actually sold well. Then he caught the Spanish flu in 1918 and died at thirty. His paintings were boxed up at the family estate and largely forgotten for forty years. When they eventually resurfaced, the rest of the art world realised it had missed one of the boldest modernists of his generation.

What's Actually Going On in This Painting

Two greyhounds streak across the canvas, almost merging into one black, sinuous shape. Below them, two cats are caught mid-leap, their striped bodies stretched into thin, almost cartoonish curves. The whole scene sits flat against an ochre yellow ground, with a strange grey arc and an orange disk floating in the corner that might be a sun or might just be pure decoration. Souza-Cardoso wasn't painting a hunt the way an English country house painter would have done. He was breaking the action down into rhythm and silhouette, somewhere between art nouveau, early cubism and Portuguese folk art. It still feels modern now, well over a hundred years after he made it.

How the Kit Plays Out

This one's satisfying because the shapes are big and bold but full of small surprises. The black bodies of the greyhounds aren't really black at all: there's deep brown, navy and warm chocolate worked through them, and the way those colours sit next to each other gives the dogs their sense of speed. The yellow ground might look like a single flat colour, but you'll find quiet shifts in temperature as you go. Even the cats reward a slower look, with those striped tails and the slightly unsettling eyes. People who normally lean toward impressionist landscapes are often surprised by how much they enjoy a piece like this, partly because the bold composition makes real progress visible every session.

More From the Famous Paintings Collection

If Amadeo's modernist energy has caught you, the rest of our Famous Paintings collection is well worth a slow scroll. You'll find more from Souza-Cardoso alongside Van Gogh, Klimt, Monet, Matisse, Mucha and Hokusai, all turned into paint by numbers kits you can finish at the kitchen table. It's a good way to live with paintings most of us only get to glimpse for thirty seconds in a museum corridor.