Untitled (Mother and Child)

At the Government School of Art in Calcutta in 1903, the sixteen-year-old Jamini Roy learned to draw classical nudes in accordance with prevailing academic tradition. Initially focused on painting impressionist landscapes and portraits during the early 1920s, he later began to experiment with the art of his own culture, looking to the living folk art of his origins for inspiration. By the early 1930s, the artist followed the Kalighat idiom to its original source - the pat paintings of Bengal. "The formal simplicity, bold rapid lines and expressive contours are some of the most striking features in Roy's pictorial language. His monumental images of sari clad women, dancers, Madonnas, Christ and animals are a combination of the playfulness of folk art and the formal strengths of academic training he underwent under Abanindranath Tagore at the Government School of Art in Calcutta." (Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-garde 1922-1947, New Delhi, 2007 p. 103-104).