Important Notice

“Whatever I have experienced in this world, I paint. Other things are not important to me.”
- N S BENDRE

Over the course of his celebrated career, N S Bendre frequently turned to female figures to explore various facets of rural and urban life in the country and to express joy. He painted images of women engaged in activities such as reading, painting, and playing music from the late 1960s onwards. "The joys and charms of the... “Whatever I have experienced in this world, I paint. Other things are not important to me.”
- N S BENDRE

Over the course of his celebrated career, N S Bendre frequently turned to female figures to explore various facets of rural and urban life in the country and to express joy. He painted images of women engaged in activities such as reading, painting, and playing music from the late 1960s onwards. "The joys and charms of the female world find expression through the late 60s in paintings of women reading, painting, playing music, braiding each other's hair or looking after children." (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai: India Book House, 2005, p. 18)

According to Ram Chatterji, in the latter half of his career, Bendre "concentrates on the depiction of joy, the charm that the world has to offer to anyone who cares to see it. He uses familiar forms... he conveys the effect of distance with gradual elimination of details. He gives prime importance to his visual experience, but he does not resort to naturalistic representation. He interprets it on his canvas in his own terms and offers what he has seen and enjoyed." (Ram Chatterji, Bendre: The Painter and the Person, Mumbai: The Bendre Foundation for Art and Culture & Indus Corporation, 1990, p. 61)

His focus, in these works, was to paint familiar scenes of domestic life without any stylisation or modelling. He avoided shadows and perspective and his paintings were invariably two-dimensional, as is noted in Untitled (Pancham).

Having travelled extensively in India and abroad, Bendre had become "...conscious of aspects beyond his immediate experience, of total perception in which his mind or emotion played a significant part... He studied the tenets of cubism and became aware of the significance of known aspects of an object, not merely the seen ones. He became aware of the images store in his mind, their context and their total environment - of all the elements that build up the total pictorial structure in a given space." (Chatterji, pp. 59-60)

Painted in 1991, towards the end of Bendre's life and career, the present lot depicts a woman tuning her sitar, perhaps to the right scale to match the pitch of the nightingale, a bird known for its beautiful song, who is positioned faithfully in front of her. While Bendre no longer uses the Pointillist style of his earlier works here, he brings a level of honest simplicity to the scene by painting it with flat areas of colour with softly blurred sections. The minimal palette and lack of minute details focus the viewer's attention on the subject depicted, thus allowing one's mind to fill with the trills and whistles of the nightingale.

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