RASIPURAM KRISHNASWAMI IYER LAXMAN | UNTITLED

Purchased from Chemould Gallery, Bombay, 1967 by private American collectors

Acquired from the above in France and gifted to a friend

Thence by descent

‘[What] Rabindranath Tagore is to Indian literature and [Maqbool Fida Husain] to Indian art, [Rasipuram Krishnaswami Lyer] Laxman is to Indian cartooning’. (‘Letters to the editor’, Financial Express, 28 January 2015, https://www.financialexpress.com/opinion/letters-to-the-editor-51/35726/)

Cartoonist and illustrator R. K. Laxman is celebrated as a national treasure in India. He is famed for his creation of ‘The Common Man’, an iconic cartoon which has run for over half a century in The Times of India. Through his cartoons, Laxman was able to provide a humorous visual commentary on the social, economic and political happenings of his nation. The current work, a charming caricature, exhibits the distinctive and effortless line of the cartoonist’s hand and the same “mood of mischievous abandon” which Laxman ascribed to his famous cartoons. (R. K. Laxman quoted in ‘RK Laxman: The old man of Bori Bunder’, DailyO, 28 January 2015 https://www.dailyo.in/politics/rk-laxman-the-old-man-of-bori-bunder-you-said-it-common-man/story/1/1715.html)