Important Notice

The Roman Catholic Church, which dominated religious life in Goa, F N Souza's birthplace, had a significant impact on the artist's life and work. The many churches of the former Portuguese colony, with their overwhelming architecture and impressive rituals, left a lasting impression on him. Souza was fascinated by their grand services, pomp and ceremony, and their use of elaborate ornate symbols and robes. Most of all, however, it was the icons... The Roman Catholic Church, which dominated religious life in Goa, F N Souza's birthplace, had a significant impact on the artist's life and work. The many churches of the former Portuguese colony, with their overwhelming architecture and impressive rituals, left a lasting impression on him. Souza was fascinated by their grand services, pomp and ceremony, and their use of elaborate ornate symbols and robes. Most of all, however, it was the icons of suffering saints and the image of Christ martyred on the cross that affected and stayed with the artist, repeatedly appearing in his work, albeit in altered forms, throughout his career.

Souza, however, soon came to see the dogma of the Church as hypocritical and repressive, and the institution's use of guilt in manipulating its congregations as sordid. Although he became increasingly averse to the ideals of Catholicism, his body of work was consumed by depictions of what he understood to be the religion's subversive influence. As Geeta Kapur explains, "The one continuing theme Souza explores...is the theme of hypocrisy and the Church, in so far as it symbolises absolute authority and camouflages with subtle cunning the hypocrisies of the elite...The recurring portraits of priests, prophets, cardinals, and Popes are therefore to be taken literally for what they are but also symbolically as representatives of institutions and authority, only more treacherous in that they claim divine sanction...It is this double connotation of fact and symbol and his interlocked feelings of secret fascination and objective disgust which make Souza's handling of religious figures so unique." (Geeta Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978, p. 20)

Souza's paintings from the 1940s, such as the present lot, were primarily works on paper and provide some of the earliest insights into the artist's style during a formative period of his career. These works were usually in watercolour or gouache, displayed a range of styles, and revealed how Souza experimented wildly during this early period of his career in order to create his own unique visual vocabulary.

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site