In the present lot, F N Souza returns to a series of still life paintings that he initially explored in the 1950s, which had a strong ecclesiastical theme. Noting his unusual approach to the genre, Geeta Kapur remarks, “He is one of the very few Indian painters to paint the still-life which is almost wholly a Western genre, and a specifically bourgeois one. His still-lifes have an odd characteristic: they consist of things used in liturgical... In the present lot, F N Souza returns to a series of still life paintings that he initially explored in the 1950s, which had a strong ecclesiastical theme. Noting his unusual approach to the genre, Geeta Kapur remarks, “He is one of the very few Indian painters to paint the still-life which is almost wholly a Western genre, and a specifically bourgeois one. His still-lifes have an odd characteristic: they consist of things used in liturgical practice. They are mostly ornate vessels and sacred objects.” (Geeta Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza: Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1978, p. 29)

The Catholic church gave Souza his “first ideas of images and image making” and its influence permeated every aspect of his art. (Mullins, p. 14) Like his figurative paintings of saints and clergymen, the still life became a site for him to negotiate his conflicting feelings of fascination with the spectacle of its rituals and scorn for what he perceived as the hypocrisy of its puritanical practices. In his words, “The Roman Catholic Church had a tremendous influence over me, not its dogmas but its grand architecture and the splendour of its services. The priest, dressed in richly embroidered vestments, each of his garments from the biretta to the chasuble symbolizing the accoutrement of Christ’s passion. These 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.” (F N Souza, “A Fragment of Autobiography”, Words & Lines, London: Villers Publications Ltd., 1959, p. 10)

Many of Souza’s still lifes incorporate liturgical objects, such as the ciborium, chalice and patens, which interrogate the ideas of divine sanction and the various interpretations of Catholic rituals. Though the objects in the present lot appear more everyday, the ecclesiastical theme persists through subtle visual cues. They are arranged across the table as if on an altar. The pitcher in the foreground recalls an ewer used to store holy water for ablutions, while the double-handled vessel at the far left resembles an ampulla, a round-bodied container for consecrated oil used in sacraments.

To the right Souza includes a pair of apples, an allusion to temptation and the Fall of Man, yet also conversely a symbol of salvation in Christian iconography when accompanied by the image of Christ. He once wrote in an essay, “An apple somehow contains several truths. There is Adam’s apple, Newton’s apple. Beckerley’s apple, Cezanne’s apple. Painting contains all these and more accumulated truths. That of form illusion, gravity and tension, sublimation of guilt, colour and geometric structure.” (F N Souza, ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’, Words and Lines, p. 18) Similarly, a bunch of grapes references the Eucharistic wine representing the Blood of Christ. As Kapur observes, these objects “belong neither to the intimate comforts of a home nor to the glamour of the marketplace, both environments being specifically bourgeoisie 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.” (Kapur, p.30).

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