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Lot Essay
Some of the most moving of Souza's paintings are those which convey a spirit of awe in the presence of a divine power […] In his religious work there is a quality of fearfulness and terrible grandeur which even Rouault and Sutherland have not equalled in this century.
- Edwin Mullins, 1962
Francis Newton Souza was born in the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1924 and raised as a practicing Roman Catholic. As he has stated, his visual repertoire was deeply influenced by the spectacle and ceremony of the churches he visited as a child with his grandmother. He recalls, “The Roman Catholic Church had a tremendous influence over me, not its dogmas but its grand architecture and the splendour of its services […] The wooden saints painted with gold and bright colours staring vacantly out of their niches. The smell of incense. And the enormous crucifix with the impaled image of a man supposed to be the Son of God, scourged and dripping, with matted hair tangled in plaited thorns. I would kneel and pray for hours. When the sacristan came around with the collection plate, I would drop on it, with great satisfaction, the large copper coin given me by my grandmother. I felt I had paid an installment for the salvation of my soul” (E. Mullins, Souza, London, 1962, p. 42).
One of the first ways in which Souza manifested this early influence in his work was through a series of still-life paintings of ecclesiastic objects placed on ornamental altar-like surfaces. Speaking about his works in this genre, the critic Geeta Kapur noted that they are not quite as irreverent or contemptuous as his other paintings, perhaps representing a rare celebration of the sacred in his oeuvre. “They are mostly ornate vessels and sacred objects. These objects retain their ritual aspect both on account of the visual description and composition. They appear brightly burnished and sometimes carry a halo such as a devotee must imagine each holy object to possess as he sees it being carried forth in High Mass. They are, moreover, clustered formally as if on the shelf of the sacristy [...] The point is, his objects belong neither to the intimate comforts of a home nor to the glamour of the market-place, both environments being specifically bourgeois in their origins. Very curiously in the object-world he reclaims the sense of the sacred that he so consciously drains from the human being and from God” (G. Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi, 1978, pp. 29-30).
In the present lot, titled Still Life in Red and painted in 1963, the artist moves away from a strictly religious interpretation of the genre with portrayals of impressive liturgical vessels on an altar. Instead, against a brick-red backdrop, possibly some kind of textile with one of its upper corners casually inverted, Souza portrays a disparate group of objects including spouted ewers, round-bodied vases, footed bowls and a patens, each with unique decorative patterning and thick black outlines. Fine hatched strokes and white highlighting around the objects further emphasize their forms against the earthy red ground. Bridging the divide between secular and sacred, mundane and enigmatic, the present lot is a compelling example of Souza’s still life paintings.
- Edwin Mullins, 1962
Francis Newton Souza was born in the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1924 and raised as a practicing Roman Catholic. As he has stated, his visual repertoire was deeply influenced by the spectacle and ceremony of the churches he visited as a child with his grandmother. He recalls, “The Roman Catholic Church had a tremendous influence over me, not its dogmas but its grand architecture and the splendour of its services […] The wooden saints painted with gold and bright colours staring vacantly out of their niches. The smell of incense. And the enormous crucifix with the impaled image of a man supposed to be the Son of God, scourged and dripping, with matted hair tangled in plaited thorns. I would kneel and pray for hours. When the sacristan came around with the collection plate, I would drop on it, with great satisfaction, the large copper coin given me by my grandmother. I felt I had paid an installment for the salvation of my soul” (E. Mullins, Souza, London, 1962, p. 42).
One of the first ways in which Souza manifested this early influence in his work was through a series of still-life paintings of ecclesiastic objects placed on ornamental altar-like surfaces. Speaking about his works in this genre, the critic Geeta Kapur noted that they are not quite as irreverent or contemptuous as his other paintings, perhaps representing a rare celebration of the sacred in his oeuvre. “They are mostly ornate vessels and sacred objects. These objects retain their ritual aspect both on account of the visual description and composition. They appear brightly burnished and sometimes carry a halo such as a devotee must imagine each holy object to possess as he sees it being carried forth in High Mass. They are, moreover, clustered formally as if on the shelf of the sacristy [...] The point is, his objects belong neither to the intimate comforts of a home nor to the glamour of the market-place, both environments being specifically bourgeois in their origins. Very curiously in the object-world he reclaims the sense of the sacred that he so consciously drains from the human being and from God” (G. Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi, 1978, pp. 29-30).
In the present lot, titled Still Life in Red and painted in 1963, the artist moves away from a strictly religious interpretation of the genre with portrayals of impressive liturgical vessels on an altar. Instead, against a brick-red backdrop, possibly some kind of textile with one of its upper corners casually inverted, Souza portrays a disparate group of objects including spouted ewers, round-bodied vases, footed bowls and a patens, each with unique decorative patterning and thick black outlines. Fine hatched strokes and white highlighting around the objects further emphasize their forms against the earthy red ground. Bridging the divide between secular and sacred, mundane and enigmatic, the present lot is a compelling example of Souza’s still life paintings.