Jamini Roy

Acquired directly from the artist in 1957 by a private New York collector

Sotheby's London, 24 May 2007, lot 23

There are very small pigment losses throughout, primarily in the areas of black pigment. Light craquelure is visible upon close inspection, particularly on white earrings of center figure and green lines on the lower right.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

A pupil of the Calcutta Government School of Art, Jamini Roy was trained in the European academic style but, by the late 1920s, he had begun to look towards the indigenous painting of Bengal. He was particularly inspired by the kalighat and pat paintings of rural Bengal. For Roy, they possessed the spontaneity and simplicity of line he was striving for. He abandoned the use of European paints in favour of mineral and vegetable based pigments made from rock-dust, tamarind seeds, alluvial mud and indigo. His admiration for rural folk art was politically motivated, part of a nationalist desire to find an artistic style free from colonialism. Roy developed his own 'striking formalist pictorial language, his simple monumental images of sari-clad women, madonnas, village dances and domestic animals, have become iconic.' (P. Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, India's artists and the avant-garde 1922-1947, Reaktion Books Ltd., London, 2007, p. 112).