Important Notice

This 1950 portrait of a tribal girl by M.F. Husain represents the artist's formative period, underscoring the early crystallization of his artistic strengths and the idiom that would soon come to define his body of work. Painted a year before the artist's large, seminal canvas, 'Man', this work was acquired from the artist by Emanuel Schlesinger, and formed part of his large collection of modern Indian art.

A Jewish intellectual who... This 1950 portrait of a tribal girl by M.F. Husain represents the artist's formative period, underscoring the early crystallization of his artistic strengths and the idiom that would soon come to define his body of work. Painted a year before the artist's large, seminal canvas, 'Man', this work was acquired from the artist by Emanuel Schlesinger, and formed part of his large collection of modern Indian art.

A Jewish intellectual who fled Vienna for India when the Second World War broke out in 1939, Schlesinger was an avid supporter of the arts and a friend of artists including Egon Schiele and Oscar Kokoschka. After a brief stint at a British internment camp in Ahmednagar, Schlesinger moved to Bombay, where he lived until his death in 1968. Here, the Austrian sought out the company of the city's community of artists, and along with two other European émigrés, Rudolf von Leyden and Walter Langhammer, soon befriended the members of its revolutionary Progressive Artists' Group and their contemporaries including M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, K.H. Ara and S.H. Raza. Championing the work of these artists and becoming one of their earliest patrons, Schlesinger is credited with bringing a new vitality to Bombay's art community in the 1940s and 50s, and playing a critical role in the early development of modern Indian art.

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