JAMINI ROY (1887-1972 AD)

“Art decorates not merely our rooms, or walls, or landings- supreme art decorates supremely”
-Jamini Roy

Jamini Roy, born in 1877 in the Bankura district of West Bengal, a region rich with folk art traditions, is seen as one of the great early masters of Indian modern art. He is renowned for his instantly recognisable proto primitive folk aesthetic which focused on quintessential indigenous imagery from village life to religious imagery. As Debabrata Roy wrote in the essay for Jamini Roy’s first exhibition in London as part of the 1982 Festival of India, “Behind much of the noble and illusive simplicity of Jamini Roy’s work lies the rich folk tradition of his native district of Bankura” (D. Roy, 'Jamini Roy, The Quest for a Personal Style’, Exhibition of Drawings & Paintings by Jamini Roy, exhibition catalogue, Calcutta, 1982, unpaginated).

At the age of sixteen, Roy travelled to Calcutta (present day Kolkata), where he studied European painting at the Government School of Art but chose to leave even before he received his diploma. The landscapes and portraits from early in his career had a distinctly Impressionistic feel using traditional oils or watercolour. However, over the 1920s and 30s, Roy turned away from the European style in favour of the purity with which he painted in his youth. Before his formal training “Roy gradually learnt to unlearn all his academic discipline. Representation was no longer his aim but transformation” (D. Roy, 1982, unpaginated).

By the 1930s Roy had entirely rejected his Western formalist training and began to look instead at Indian influence such as Kalighat and Bengali folk paintings for inspiration. “Then followed the practice of an austere economy in his use of both colour and line. Roy went through a phase of executing monochrome brush drawings in which he purified the quality of his line and trained it to express volume and movement. Water-based tempera colour had thus opened a horizon of new possibilities” (D. Roy, 1982, unpaginated). These monochromatic works in black and grey were often drawn using just one single continuous line giving his works a beguiling fluidity and harmony that belied its skill.

Over the years Roy’s style would turn to much brighter palette more associated with Kalighat paintings (an example of which is lot 118). His subject matter would also shift towards more narrative epics like the Ramayana and the Christian imagery of Byzantine murals. His innovative rendering of images of Hindu Gods and Christian saints were lauded for their bridging of European and Indian aesthetics, at a time when artists were seeking new forms of expression to break free of colonial constraints and reconnect with their cultural roots. The present lot encapsulates a unique visual idiom for India as Roy reinterpreted local traditions through a modernist idiom.