Important Notice

Long before achieving the developed pictorial language that he is celebrated for, Jamini Roy received rigorous training in the academic style under pioneers such as Olinto Ghilardi, Percy Brown, and Abanindranath Tagore. Portraiture was then at the centre of his career and much of it owed itself to his enrollment in the Government School of Art and Craft, Kolkata in 1903-04. The prescribed mode of teaching at the time adhered to academic... Long before achieving the developed pictorial language that he is celebrated for, Jamini Roy received rigorous training in the academic style under pioneers such as Olinto Ghilardi, Percy Brown, and Abanindranath Tagore. Portraiture was then at the centre of his career and much of it owed itself to his enrollment in the Government School of Art and Craft, Kolkata in 1903-04. The prescribed mode of teaching at the time adhered to academic training that strove towards perfecting the standardised norms of drawing, anatomy, composition, and perspective. During the course of his training, two mutually exclusive courses of Western art and Indian art were formed. Roy chose Indian art, under the tutelage of Abanindranath Tagore, but found mixing British watercolours with Japanese wash technique strange, and opted for Western painting shortly after.

On perusing Roy's oeuvre, isolating the first two decades of his career, one finds his preoccupation with Modern Western art and a deft execution of the same. He concerned himself with exercises to follow suit of the technique of impressionist masters, particularly Van Gogh, to better understand the application of colour, often copying some portraits with a delightful originality and signing them with English initials. In these works, his academic training takes precedence in the skilful application of a set of contrasting colours, placed together in bold strokes. Much like the present lot, "his early works show adeptness in draughtsmanship and a technical proficiency that attests to a clear understanding of the structure and principles of Western naturalism. After four years, having mastered the illusion of the Albertian window, he entered the Calcutta art scene to become a successful painter of portraits. Roy's portrait of Tagore and Gandhi testifies to his appreciation of naturalistic form and colouring as understood in the European sense." (Sona Datta, Urban Patua: The Art of Jamini Roy, Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2010, p. 32)

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