SANAT THAKER | IMPRESSIONS – KULU – MANALI IX

Acquired from a local auction house, Denmark, circa 2015

Sanat Thaker was born in Jodiya, Gujarat, in 1917. Between 1936 and 1938 he studied landscape and portraiture in Karachi under Mr. M. D. Trivedi, later graduating from the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay in 1957. Thaker won a number of awards throughout his career, including from the Bombay Art Society, Gujurat State Lalit Kala Academy and New Delhi’s All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society. The current lot, an example of Thaker’s mature artistic style, is from a series titled ‘Impressions – Kulu – Manali’ from 1980. Thaker travelled to the mountainous villages of Himachal Pradesh and painted his surroundings en plein air in watercolour. He then painted his abstract impressions of the landscapes in oils in his Chitrakoot studio. These luminous and prismatic oil paintings were exhibited in a solo show at the Taj Art Gallery in Bombay in 1980 and reflect the rugged beauty and quality of light which had inspired Thaker in the Himachal valleys.

The Times of India announced Thaker’s exhibition at the Taj, praising the artist’s masterful use of colour and form. ‘… Sanat Thaker, for all his years, paints with youthful zest and the joy of being, which… breathe[s] a romance not so much of love as of living… The colours, applied to reflect the clear atmosphere of the valley surroundings, are carefully measured in terms of space and value so as to avoid any redundance of a particular note… Sanat Thaker’s exhibition should help young painters understand the meaning of landscape in art when it is tinged in the romantic glow of beauty’. (S. V. Vasudev, ‘Sanat’s landscape beautiful’, The Times of India, 18 September 1980, p. 6)