Hemendranath Mazumdar (1894-1948)

Hemendranath Mazumdar resisted the ‘Indianising’ trends of the Bengal School to become a successful academic painter.  The style of his paintings followed in the tradition of Ravi Varma, and covered the same range of religious and mythological themes, focusing mainly on sensual studies of women.  These images of women in various stages of undress would have verged on the pornographic; yet through their suggested identities of wives and mothers, ideal feminine models, they represented a respectable veneer and came to occupy a ‘legitimate’ area of middle class taste.