Important Notice

Lot 4

 

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Recent scholarships have shed light upon early Bengal oil paintings which constitute works made during the latter part of the 18th and 19th centuries, between the end of the Company School and the rise of academically trained oil painters. Though written references for these paintings remain scant, a vast body of work is available for studies in technique, style evolution, and iconography.

The adoption of oil as a medium by Indian artists... Recent scholarships have shed light upon early Bengal oil paintings which constitute works made during the latter part of the 18th and 19th centuries, between the end of the Company School and the rise of academically trained oil painters. Though written references for these paintings remain scant, a vast body of work is available for studies in technique, style evolution, and iconography.

The adoption of oil as a medium by Indian artists was largely due to the presence and influence of the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and the British in Bengal, as well as the patronage of artists by European collectors and Indian aristocrats who had developed a fondness for the medium. There was “a steady influx of art objects, paintings and prints from Europe that the traditional Bengali artisan now had before him as role models. Putting their inherent skills to new use, these artisans developed a technique and a style that is unique in the history of painting and printmaking.” (Paula Sengupta, “White, Black and Grey: The Colonial Interface,” Kishore Singh ed., The Art of Bengal, New Delhi: DAG, 2012, p. 11)

The artists of this school remain largely anonymous till date. Their pictorial language was a combination of the artistic styles of Indian painting traditions and Western naturalism while the subjects originated from Hindu mythology. These paintings “represented gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, the Krishna legend, the epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, and popular myths and legends. The courtesan too was a popular subject of representation. These subjects are, in fact, important to locate how the traditional folk style was merging with European nationalism…” (Paula Sengupta quoted in Kishore Singh ed., “Anonymous (Early Bengal),” Masterpieces of Indian Modern Art II, New Delhi: DAG, 2017, p. 24) Some works also show stylistic affinity with Kalighat paintings while others seem to have ably adopted naturalistic shading and depth as well as scientific perspective from foreign examples.

Annapurna Feeding Lord Shiva (lot 4) exemplifies this style that employed a borrowed medium to render a narrative that is essentially Indian. “A bejewelled and enthroned Annapurna, clad in a red sari, ladles rice into the cupped hands of Shiva, who stands before her with snakes in his matted hair and a tiger skin about his loins.” (Gilles Tillotson, “Making Magic Through the Real: Some Early Episodes of Modern Indian Art,” Rob Dean, Giles Tillotson eds., Modern Indian Painting: Jane & Kito de Boer Collection, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd, 2019, p. 67) Further, writer Gilles Tillotson highlights that “the principal figures are more fully modelled and are placed in the foreground of a landscape setting, whose depth and tranquillity suggest at once both Shiva’s distant wandering and the present mood of harmony. The detail is finer, in the jewellery and even in the plate of rice. But above all the perspective and shading create the sense of an event unfolding before us.” (Tillotson, p. 67)

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