Guatemala no.7 (Dying Vulture), 1957 (February)

During the 1950s Congdon travelled extensively across the world, including North Africa, the Middle East, South America and India. In early 1957 his search for new subjects took him to Guatemala. There he spent nearly two months painting in a studio he set up in the semi-ruined Convent of the Carmen, in Antigua. In a letter to Ede, a close friend of his, he described it as a ‘dark and windowless chapel, the only light coming from a tiny cupola’, and mentioned the many vultures flying overhead.

In Antigua Congdon made five paintings of vultures, a subject with deep symbolical connotations. He treated the bird as an expression of grief and suffering, anticipating the more overtly religious subjects of his later work. In old age he came to consider this painting, which Jim acquired in 1969, as one of his more successful.