Jamini Roy

Jamini Roy was born in 1887 in a village in Bankura district, West Bengal, and trained from age sixteen at the Government College of Art in Calcutta in the European academic manner, becoming a skilled portrait and landscape painter in that idiom. In the 1920s, dissatisfied with the style, he began studying the pata (scroll) painting of Bengal's own patua folk artists, along with Kalighat pat painting sold near the Kalighat temple, and the terracotta temple art and Santhal tribal art of the region. He adopted their visual grammar for his own work: flat planes of colour, bold black outlines, simplified almond-shaped eyes, and a limited natural palette of earth colours, rice-paste white, and vermillion, made using pigments prepared by hand rather than imported oil paints.

Roy painted the same repertoire of subjects the patuas had long painted — Krishna and Radha, Durga, the Santhal daily life of his home district, and Christian subjects such as the Last Supper reworked in the same flat idiom — and worked deliberately outside the market for individually signed, high-priced fine art, producing his images in volume at low, fixed prices so they would remain within reach of ordinary buyers, much as the folk paintings that inspired them had always been. He was honoured with the Padma Bhushan in 1954 and became one of the first artists whose work the Indian government declared a national art treasure, restricting export of his paintings. His deliberate turn from an imported academic style back toward Bengal's own folk visual tradition is widely credited with opening the path that later Indian modernists took in seeking a visual language of their own rather than a purely European one.