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“So animated, so brisk was her walk... I sat there aghast... looking at her, at her frail body bend at the back. She was in a coarse white cotton sari, worn in the Bengali style. Her face, her wrinkled skin was illuminated by an inner light.” - M F HUSAIN

Husain’s meeting with Mother Teresa had a profound impact on his work, prompting him to capture her essence on canvas. To Husain, Mother Teresa was symbolic of compassion, care,... “So animated, so brisk was her walk... I sat there aghast... looking at her, at her frail body bend at the back. She was in a coarse white cotton sari, worn in the Bengali style. Her face, her wrinkled skin was illuminated by an inner light.” - M F HUSAIN

Husain’s meeting with Mother Teresa had a profound impact on his work, prompting him to capture her essence on canvas. To Husain, Mother Teresa was symbolic of compassion, care, and motherly love. “I have tried to capture in my paintings what her presence meant to the destitute and the dying, the light and hope she brought by mere inquiry, by putting her hand over a child abandoned in a street. I did not cry at this encounter. I returned with so much strength and sadness that it continues to ferment within. That is why I try it again and again, after a gap of time, in a different medium. To translate that pain in my paintings, I think I will have to die of it.” (Artist quoted in Ila Pal, Beyond the Canvas: An Unfinished Portrait of M F Husain, New Delhi: Indus, 1994, p. 166)

One of Husain’s earliest interactions with Mother Teresa dates back to 1979, at the Palam Airport, New Delhi. She had accepted the Noble Prize for Peace and was received by throngs of people hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Among them was Husain who, in that moment, was able to conjure up and present her with a sketch. Although it was a brief meeting, she signed his sketch, inscribing the words “God bless you”, before handing it back to him, marking the beginning of his journey to capture her likeness.

The discourse around the artist’s depictions of Mother Teresa circles back to Husain’s loss of his mother during infancy and his yearning for a maternal figure. As Rashda Siddiqui explains, “Occasional glimpses of such love as the mother have for children, would fill him with immense agony and ecstasy to an ultimate devouring darkness. He had not really been able to recapture the intense colours of that experience.” (Rashda Siddiqui, M F Husain: In Conversation With Husain Paintings, New Delhi: Books Today, 2001, p. 204) However, his interactions with Mother Teresa allowed him a glimpse into selfless maternal love that he yearned for. In order to capture his vision of her, Husain travelled to Italy to study pre-Renaissance paintings of saints and apostles, and learned how to render the folds of their robes, which according to him, “seemed capable of covering, canopying and sheltering.” (Artist quoted in Pal, p. 166) “In Mother Teresa he found the universal mother, not as a face, but a presence where one could repose without guilt, become small, and lose oneself in her spacious lap...” (Pal, p. 166)

Although Husain painted her as a faceless figure, her form is rooted in representation and a deep sense of reverence. Recounting his first interaction with her, Husain noted that her face was “suffused with tender love and her posture discerning humility.” As he watched her comforting sick children and the elderly, he observed that “her personality, her presence and her work are so great;” that he couldn’t “depict it all in realistic form.” (Siddiqui, p. 203). The present lot showcases Husain’s conundrum, wherein he paints the saint’s form, void of any realistic features. However, through capturing her cradling an infant and with a child at her feet, the artist creates a metaphor, channelling his admiration and yearning onto the canvas.

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