Important Notice

As the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British gained a foothold in India over four centuries, their colonial influence shaped not just the history and politics of Bengal but also its cultural taste and appetite. By the mid-18th century, European artists, such as Tilly Kettle, arrived in India seeking their fortune and popularised the naturalistic technique of painting that was dominant in the West at the time. Oil portraiture was seen as a... As the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British gained a foothold in India over four centuries, their colonial influence shaped not just the history and politics of Bengal but also its cultural taste and appetite. By the mid-18th century, European artists, such as Tilly Kettle, arrived in India seeking their fortune and popularised the naturalistic technique of painting that was dominant in the West at the time. Oil portraiture was seen as a lucrative profession during this period, however, “...it was not just oil portraits but oil painting itself that was the most important contribution of Western art to colonial India. Taught at art schools, it transformed Indian art in terms of scale, style and subject matter.” (Partha Mitter, “The Phenomenon: Occidental Orientations,” Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations, London: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 17 - 18)

The Early Bengal School flourished in Bengal 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. The artists of this school, who remain largely anonymous till date, combined Western naturalism and Company School art with Indian art traditions, such as Mughal miniatures, Pattachitra art, and Kalighat pat watercolour paintings that developed in the bazaars of 19th-century Calcutta, to create a style that was vastly different from any other artistic movement prevalent during this time.

The subjects of the Early Bengal School artists drew largely from Indian religion and mythology. “...the realism works on two levels. Divine, mythological and epic subjects are given a new realism through the adoption of the style and technique of Western oil painting, which create the illusion of real space and naturalistic light and shade. No less important and transformative is the transference of the subjects into modern settings that were familiar to the 19th-century viewer. And if the supernatural is made to appear natural, so conversely at the same time does the naturalism acquire new dimensions by absorbing the divine and the marvellous.” (Giles Tillotson, “Making Magic Through the Real: Some Early Episodes of Modern Indian Art,” Rob Dean and Giles Tillotson eds., Modern Indian Painting: Jane & Kito de Boer Collection, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2019, pp. 75 - 76)

The present lot 11, a portrait of the goddess Lakshmi, is an exquisite example of the blending of these diverse techniques. While the sense of depth in the image and the depiction of the two figures accompanying the goddess as well as the background appear influenced by Western academic realism, the figures carry “the linear and tubular quality of the Kalighat images with similar shading along the outlines of limbs and drapery folds.” (Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “Artisans, Artists and Popular Picture Production,” The Making of a ‘New’ Indian Art: Artists: Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850-1920, London: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 38 - 39) The ethereal rendition of Lakshmi’s halo is another important stylistic marker of the influence of Western art on Kalighat pats and Bengal oils, in contrast to ancient Indian paintings and sculptures that depicted the halo as a physical disc. In contrast, lot 12 retains a greater affinity with Indian miniature traditions seen in the flat, opaque rendering of the figures, the positioning of the goddess Jagaddhatri near the centre of the frame, and the flat, stylised depiction of her vahan (vehicle), the lion, and the elephant below.

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site