Untitled

Painted during his student days, Bijan Chowdhury created a quotidienne picture of the countryside in this watercolour—the theme and the medium were both enjoying their heydays in that decade. Though Chowdhury wasn’t yet twenty when he executed this watercolour, he showed excellent command over the medium, and exhibited an astute sense of observation. In subsequent decades, as the city of his karma—Calcutta—would undergo far-reaching socio-political upheavals, so would Chowdhury’s work in subject and treatment, pushing the memory of languid rural vignettes to the background.