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Lot Essay
I have always readily responded to nature's strong imperatives, to its swift changing moods, to its grandeur and monumentality. Divinity in nature can perhaps be captured by silence and stillness-by a rendering of its atmosphere, a depiction of its quality of colour and light. With it comes a liberation of the spirit and all repressions fall away.
– Jehangir Sabavala, 2008
Located between the real and the ideal, the landscapes that Jehangir Sabavala created over the course of his career are intuitive and timeless. Paintings like this one, inspired by scenes he encountered on his extensive travels in India, are carefully planned and constructed based on meticulous linear schema and highly nuanced color-maps. The end results are images of land, sea and sky unlike any others, at once restrained and emotionally charged.
Sabavala borrows the title of this 1970 painting, Green Thoughts in a Green Shade, from the well-known seventeenth century poem “The Garden” by Andrew Marvell. Originally alluding to the space for peaceful, natural contemplation offered by a garden, the phrase ‘green thoughts in a green shade’ has since become popular in other contexts including prose, music and art, symbolizing a retreat from human society and its worries into verdant tranquility.
Writing about the present lot in his 1980 volume on the artist, poet and critic Dilip Chitre noted, “This unusually lyrical painting is unique for its evocation of joyous surprise and mystical delight in nature. For once, Sabavala’s ascetism and inwardness seem to have left him. He remembers that his footfall alarmed a group of white butterflies resting in a tangle of bushes by the roadside. The butterflies took wing in a hectic flurry against a deep, partly luminous and partly dark background. Here he recreates the image of that sudden intimate encounter from memory: so many focal points and planes overlap and dissolve, mingle and separate here, that the whole depth of space comes suddenly alive” (D. Chitre, The Reasoning Vision, Jehangir Sabavala's Painterly Universe, New Delhi, 1980, p. 68).
In this painting, Sabavala recreates this moment of surprise and joy, which stayed with him as a reminder of the simple pleasures that one can find in nature. Rather than the ‘ascetic’ quests that many of his other works from the period allude to, with draped figures dwarfed by the landscape they traverse, in this painting, the fluttering white butterflies and sun-dappled thicket they emerge from offer us the opportunity to pause our journey and contemplate the wonder and serenity we encounter along the way.
In a posthumous tribute to the artist, his friend and author Jerry Pinto noted that in paintings like this one, which was featured on the front cover of the catalogue for his 1972-73 exhibitions New Delhi and Bombay, Sabavala proved, decade after decade, that painting was not an exhausted art form and that “the canvas could pose new questions [...] There are still many mysteries in those enigmatic and serene landscapes into which it would seem their creator has now slipped” (J. Pinto, “The painter of signs”, The Hindu, 17 November 2011, accessed January 2026).
– Jehangir Sabavala, 2008
Located between the real and the ideal, the landscapes that Jehangir Sabavala created over the course of his career are intuitive and timeless. Paintings like this one, inspired by scenes he encountered on his extensive travels in India, are carefully planned and constructed based on meticulous linear schema and highly nuanced color-maps. The end results are images of land, sea and sky unlike any others, at once restrained and emotionally charged.
Sabavala borrows the title of this 1970 painting, Green Thoughts in a Green Shade, from the well-known seventeenth century poem “The Garden” by Andrew Marvell. Originally alluding to the space for peaceful, natural contemplation offered by a garden, the phrase ‘green thoughts in a green shade’ has since become popular in other contexts including prose, music and art, symbolizing a retreat from human society and its worries into verdant tranquility.
Writing about the present lot in his 1980 volume on the artist, poet and critic Dilip Chitre noted, “This unusually lyrical painting is unique for its evocation of joyous surprise and mystical delight in nature. For once, Sabavala’s ascetism and inwardness seem to have left him. He remembers that his footfall alarmed a group of white butterflies resting in a tangle of bushes by the roadside. The butterflies took wing in a hectic flurry against a deep, partly luminous and partly dark background. Here he recreates the image of that sudden intimate encounter from memory: so many focal points and planes overlap and dissolve, mingle and separate here, that the whole depth of space comes suddenly alive” (D. Chitre, The Reasoning Vision, Jehangir Sabavala's Painterly Universe, New Delhi, 1980, p. 68).
In this painting, Sabavala recreates this moment of surprise and joy, which stayed with him as a reminder of the simple pleasures that one can find in nature. Rather than the ‘ascetic’ quests that many of his other works from the period allude to, with draped figures dwarfed by the landscape they traverse, in this painting, the fluttering white butterflies and sun-dappled thicket they emerge from offer us the opportunity to pause our journey and contemplate the wonder and serenity we encounter along the way.
In a posthumous tribute to the artist, his friend and author Jerry Pinto noted that in paintings like this one, which was featured on the front cover of the catalogue for his 1972-73 exhibitions New Delhi and Bombay, Sabavala proved, decade after decade, that painting was not an exhausted art form and that “the canvas could pose new questions [...] There are still many mysteries in those enigmatic and serene landscapes into which it would seem their creator has now slipped” (J. Pinto, “The painter of signs”, The Hindu, 17 November 2011, accessed January 2026).