Jamini Roy

Jamini Roy was born in 1887 in Beliatore, a village in Bankura district, Bengal, into a family of landowners. At sixteen he went to the Government College of Art in Calcutta, where Abanindranath Tagore was vice-principal. He was taught the academic way, drawing classical nudes and painting in oils, and took his diploma in 1908. For some years he made a living painting commissioned portraits.

In the early 1920s he gave that up. E. B. Havell’s teaching and a lecture by Rabindranath Tagore had convinced him to look to his own culture, and he found it in living folk art: the Kalighat pat, with its bold sweeping strokes, and the scroll painters of the Bengal villages. When Kalighat itself had lost its roots, he went to learn from village patuas directly, and he preferred to be called one. His first experiments, between 1921 and 1924, began from the Santhal dance.

From then on the pictures are flat, with thick outlines and a few colours made from lamp black, earth and mineral pigments and organic tempera. He wanted art within reach of ordinary middle-class people and worked accordingly: by one count he made some twenty thousand paintings.

A one-man show in Calcutta in 1929, sponsored by Mukul Dey, was opened by Alfred Watson, editor of The Statesman. In the 1940s his buyers were the Bengali middle class and the European community. His work was shown in London in 1946 and New York in 1953. He received the Padma Bhushan in 1954, became the second Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1956, and died in Calcutta in 1972.