Important Notice

Beauty and the female form long fascinated M.F. Husain, particularly the way in which they are approached and linked within various local Indian cultural practices and aesthetic traditions. Husain's interpretations of this rich and unique engagement with figuration in India segue the boundary between the realistic and the idealistic.

From the early formal, structural studies of rural women that the artist executed in the early 1950s,... Beauty and the female form long fascinated M.F. Husain, particularly the way in which they are approached and linked within various local Indian cultural practices and aesthetic traditions. Husain's interpretations of this rich and unique engagement with figuration in India segue the boundary between the realistic and the idealistic.

From the early formal, structural studies of rural women that the artist executed in the early 1950s, to the more abstract, faceless and sensuous female bodies that he painted later, Husain's reverence for the woman is more than apparent in his extensive oeuvre. These works "…indicate a female body type that Husain was steadily evolving since his encounter with Gupta sculptures in 1948 and Chola sculptures in Madras Museum in the 1950's. He had also studied the famous erotic sculptures of Khajuraho in which the female figures are far more voluptuous and generously endowed than in Gupta sculptures" (K. Bikram Singh, Maqbool Fida Husain, Rahul & Art, New Delhi, 2008, p. 111, 112).

In the present lot, the artist paints the figure of a seated woman in an almost monochromatic palette of blues, recalling his seminal 1950s portraits 'Pagan Girl' and 'Pagan Mother'. Rather than the child he painted in 'Pagan Mother', however, coiled on this figure's knees is a cobra, symbolic of the concept of eternity, and widely worshipped in India as a sacred protector.

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