Jamini Roy

Jamini Roy was one of the earliest and most significant modernists of Indian art.

Trained in the British academic style of painting, Jamini Roy became well known as a skilled portraitist.

After graduating from the Government Art School Kolkata, in 1916, he received regular commissions. Most of his paintings were in Western styles, like portraiture and impressionism.

However, influenced by the growing surge of nationalism, Jamini Roy consciously rejected Western artistic styles and searched for a more 'Indian' form of artistic expression.

He sought inspiration from East Asian calligraphy, terracotta temple friezes, folk arts and crafts traditions. From calligraphy, to animals, to Jesus Christ, his work encompassed many different subjects and motifs.

He inflected these subjects with his unique modernist style. Roy reinterpreted South Asian iconography and subject matter with modern, graphic lines.

Here we explore the different motifs, styles and stages that defined his work...

In the first few years of the 1920s, Jamini Roy created several paintings with what he called his “flat technique.”

Roy said that, like Chinese landscapes, he wanted to discard nonessential background details.

The subjects were mostly Santal women. The Santal are a tribal community indigenous to India.

From 1924 onwards, Jamini Roy experimented with a new, more simplistic visual style. His images for the most part became monochromatic – an austere play of white, soft grey and black.

Even while Roy was exploring indigenous themes, he was simultaneously copying from the works of the great European masters. His studio was like a laboratory where he could study the elements of composition and how the paint was applied.

His mastery over the techniques of the great European painters led him to paint local landscapes using tempera. He also painted some portraits in this style.

Given the air of solemnity in his paintings, the touches of irony, playfulness and whimsy come as a pleasing surprise. Roy's lighter touch is most clear in his paintings of birds and beasts. For instance, the cat in Cat and the Lobster has its tail ending in a colourful trefoil.

The bird here has a charming perkiness.

The solid presence of the bull here is contrasted by the light, free and colourful lines that surround its body.

Along with his rustic figures, Jamini Roy also began to draw on the imagery of epics and mythology, introducing a narrative element to his painting. It also helped him to communicate with ordinary people by entering familiar imaginative space.

Through the 1930s, he painted scenes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.

The Krishna Leela series of painting is different to Roy's other work. Instead of the sturdy, erect figures in other paintings by him, in these the figures lie on a bent or dynamic axis.

With stylised birds, animals and suggestive tree forms, Jamini Roy created idyllic pastoral scenes, conjuring a romantic rural utopia of his imagination.

The language of Roy's Christ paintings is remarkable for other reasons as well. Roy invests the grave, contemplative faces, in their somewhat hieratic poses, with vibrancy.

Roy's work also features infinite variations of mother and child figures. It is difficult to gauge from the present day what thoughts may have led to his interest in this theme.

Many scholars question whether the subject had an emotional charge for him. Were his experiments with the theme an outcome of Bengal’s obsession with mother worship? Or was it just an interesting juxtaposition of forms which allowed for endless artistic explorations?

From the end of the 1920s, Jamini Roy rejected the European oil medium and began to use traditional pigments from vegetable and mineral sources. And, in tandem with this, the imagery of these artworks was drawn from village life.

He invested the peasants, artisans, followers of religious cults, village women and adivasis with immense dignity. He represented in his paintings what they held sacred.

He painted from folk tales and narratives that permeated the rural consciousness.