Untitled (Portrait of a Parsi Lady)

Born in 1872 in the village of Pitha near Surat, Manchershaw Fakirjee Pithawalla was among the first generation of artists to graduate from the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay at the turn of the Twentieth Century. "Manchershaw Pithawalla was one of India's most celebrated salon artists. An alumnus of the Sir Jamshedji Jeejeebhoy School of Art, Bombay, this scion of Western India's Parsi micro-minority was trained in the academic solidities of genre; he imbibed the techniques of conventional academic realism, as disseminated by the Royal Academy. With these graces went a social ideology. The salon painter's patrons belonged to the dominant classes of the British Empire. Accordingly, in common with many of his confr©res, M.F. Pithawalla portrayed the lives and likenesses of his patrons, the aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie, to advantage. At a deeper level, his portraiture enshrined the values of this elite, comprising merchant-princes, lawyers, landowners and their ladies. Through his rendering of detail, the sitters' expressions and gestures, the fall of light on their rich but discreet clothes, the gleam of wood panelling, the exquisite highlights on chinaware, Pithawalla memorialised the values of India's Victorian colonial establishment: worldly success and ethical striving, self-assurance and permanence." (R. Hoskote, Manifestations II, Indian Art in the 20th Century, Delhi, 2004, p. 171)