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M.F. Husain has always been passionate about India and its people, and a deep humanism has informed his creative process since he began to paint in the 1940s. With his unique modern idiom, firmly rooted in the country’s multifaceted cultural tapestry, Husain confidently “…delivers the common man from the ordinariness of his existence to the international arena” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford... M.F. Husain has always been passionate about India and its people, and a deep humanism has informed his creative process since he began to paint in the 1940s. With his unique modern idiom, firmly rooted in the country’s multifaceted cultural tapestry, Husain confidently “…delivers the common man from the ordinariness of his existence to the international arena” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 101). Though he is an almost entirely self-taught artist, today, Husain’s accessible and provocative work continues to ensure a place for him among India’s most popular and critically acclaimed artists.

Like the subjects of Husain’s earlier works that drew extensively from India’s folk art and craft traditions, the figures portrayed in the present lot “…are shorn of all mystique”, and yet “…imbued with an aura that they bring from their rootedness to the earth. The strong bright colours, applied with jagged strokes on the canvas and placed according to the mood invoked, bring in all the sights and sounds of the street and with it all the multiplicity of life in India” (Ibid.). Using a palette of gold and green to reflect the riches of the earth, the artist breathes life into his dream of expressing the multiple realities of India on canvas, especially the rural ones of his own childhood in the small villages of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh.

Echoing his seminal 1960 canvas titled ‘Farmer’s Family’, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, here, an able-bodied farming family is depicted alongside their livestock and tools celebrating the harvest, a commemorative theme that Husain also explored in the series of Holi paintings he executed during the 1950s and 60s. As nurturers of the land and guardians of its fertility, these undemanding farmers provide the sustenance on which the rest of the nation depends, and are held in high esteem by the artist.

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