Untitled (Mother and Child)

Born in Bengal in 1887, Jamini Roy studied at the Government School of Art and Craft in Calcutta from 1906 to 1914. He trained under the guidance of Abanindranath Tagore, a pioneer of the Bengal School of Art, and began his career painting landscapes and portraits in an Impressionistic and distinctly Western style. By the late 1930s, his style shifted and he developed a new, unique aesthetic. Inspired by Kalighat and Bengali folk painting, Roy began to employ traditional South Asian iconography using two dimensional forms, natural pigments, flat fields of color and crisp and clean lines.

Roy’s art was accessible in that it was familiar and easily understood by a large cross-section of society. He portrayed popular characters and scenes from the great Hindu myths of the Ramayana and Krishna Lila, visuals of the everyday life of men and women of rural Bengal, and of its Santhal tribal community.

"Roy noted that the art of Metropolitan Calcutta, irrespective of whether it was revivalist or in the Western academic style, was dependant not only on elitist but affluent patronage and he wanted art to regain the easy availability and inexpensiveness it had in the traditional life of the people. He was wholly in favour of making art, meant for the collectivity and not for the affluent few." (K. Chaitanya, A History of Indian Painting: The Modern Period, New Delhi, 1995, p. 178)