The Vigil

Gobardhan Ash enrolled in the Government College of Art in 1926 and, deeply disillusioned by the curriculum, dropped out and joined the Madras School of Art to train under the mentorship of Devi Prosad Roychowdhury. Ash responded to the turbulence of the Bengal Famine with a series of rusty brown washes, which hovers somewhere between the gritty documentation of Chittaprosad and the abstract energy of Somnath Hore. He drew many self-portraits to record the subtle changes in his personality. From the 1940s onwards, he adopted gouache as a medium. In this portrait, we see a well-groomed man staring back at us—the use of concentric squares makes his eyes appear somewhat eerie.