Attributed to Julio Pomar, no coa, private collection, medium: oil, measurements: 20"hx24"w framed, mint condition, Biography: Júlio Artur da Silva Pomar, GOL, GCM was a Portuguese painter and visual artist. He was often considered the greatest Portuguese painter of his generation.Pomar work became very politically and ideological engaged during his neo-realist phase, from 1945 to 1957. In 1946, he started a mural at the Cine Teatro Batalha, in Porto, which would be destroyed for political reasons in 1948. He was one of the main organizers and exhibiters of the General Exhibitions of Plastic Arts, from 1946 to 1956, that were the main exhibitions of Portuguese neo-realist painting during this time. One of his paintings, Resistência (Resistance) was apprehended by the Political Police in 1947, at the second exhibition, deemed as "political subversive". The same year he held his first individual exhibition at the Portugália Gallery, in Porto. He also would be arrested for four months, for being a member of the MUD. He did the official portrait of Democratic Opposition Presidential candidate, general José Norton de Matos, in 1948. In 1949, he lost his place of Drawing teacher at the technical education because of his political involvement in the campaign.His first truly neo-realist painting was Gadanheiro (Mower), from 1945, while his most emblematic work in this style would be O Almoço do Trolha (The Lunch of the Trolley), where he worked from 1946 to 1950, and was first exhibited in 1947. Portuguese art historian Rui Mário Gonçalves described it as one of "the most important milestones of Neo-realist painting, with its theme taken from the life of the proletariat, treated with rough material and with a Portinariesque anatomical accentuation of the feet and hands".During these youth years, he also worked on illustration and ceramics. He became less compromised with time with the neo-realist movement and his last important works in this style were the paintings that he did called Ciclo do Arroz (Rice Cicle), from 1952-1955, inspired by several travels to Ribatejo's rice fields in the company of writer Alves Redol. Like art historian Alexandre Pomar explained, "Around 1956, without a precise point of rupture in its pictorial production or an explicit departure from the previous political positions, the itinerary of Pomar begins to be oriented in other directions".