Painting of Dancing Gopi

Jamini Roy is one of the fathers of modern Indian art, a leading painter in India’s nationalist art school in Calcutta. His work combines South Asian folk art traditions and international modernist aesthetics. This painting is one of Roy’s iconic images of an Indian woman. With arms raised and feet crossed, her pose evokes a sense of dance, recalling other representations of the female form in South Asia's artistic past, from nature divinities and goddess sculpture to images of Krishna's Gopis and even 'Mother India'.