The grandnephew of the well-known sculptor V. P. Karmakar, and the son of an artist who worked in Bombay film studios, Prabhakar Barwe was born on 16 March 1936 in Nagaon, Maharashtra. He joined Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, in 1954. Learn More
An artist whose eponymously named art institution groomed some important Indian modern artists such as Ram Kumar and J. Swaminathan, Sarada Charan Ukil was an early pioneer of the Bengal School. Born on 14 November 1888 in Bikrampur near present-day Dhaka, Ukil shifted later to Calcutta with his family and studied at the city’s Government Art School under Abanindranath Tagore. Learn More
Born in Bombay, Pestonji E. Bomanji joined Sir J. J. School of Art at the age of thirteen. While there, the principal, John Griffiths, identified his talent and appointed him a draughtsman on an expedition to the Ajanta caves in 1872, which he came to head in 1880. Though Bomanji initially wanted to be a sculptor, his interest in portraiture was triggered after 1877, when Griffiths recommended him as an apprentice to Valentine Prinsep, a visiting artist; he went on to train under John Lockwood Kipling. Learn More
For a socially responsive artist like Nataraj Sharma, the frenzied pace of change in contemporary times coupled with his upbringing in vastly different cultural milieus of India, Egypt, England, and Zambia, has proved to be the proverbial grist for his art mill. Learn More
Modernist sculptor Madan Lal Gupta is as much known for his constantly evolving experimental practise as for Ram Chhatpar Shilp Nyas, a trust he founded in 1989 in Varanasi for the promotion of contemporary arts and classical music, in memory of his guru, Ram Chhatpar, who passed away at the age of forty-four in 1978. Learn More
Born in a village in the East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, Reddeppa Naidu acquired his formal education in Kakinada and later studied at the Government College of Art and Craft, Madras, where he was mentored by K. C. S. Paniker. He held his first exhibition in Madras in 1958. Learn More
Born in Kamalia in pre-Partition Punjab, Kanwal Krishna lived the life, he said, ‘of a wandering gypsy’. In the 1950s, several artists began to explore landscape painting as a separate genre in order to establish a modernist language among whom Krishna’s work stood out. Krishna was inspired by the forces of nature as he travelled to forbidden Tibet, Kashmir, Europe, and other places. Learn More
Indra Dugar, unlike his illustrious father Hirachand Dugar (1898-1951), did not have any formal education in art. Born in 1918 in Jiaganj in Murshidabad, West Bengal, he sub-consciously absorbed the artistic ambience of Santiniketan where he grew up; his father was one of the earliest students at Kala Bhavana at the Visva-Bharati University. Dugar acquired art skills from his father and considered Santiniketan his alma mater. He was inspired by his father’s mentor Nandalal Bose, who saw great promise in him. Learn More
A large number of anonymous oils on religious and mythological themes began to emerge in Bengal in the late eighteenth–early nineteenth century from the French colony of Chandernagore and the Dutch colony of Chinsurah. Variously called French or Dutch Bengal oils, they also came from other areas like Chitpur and Garanhata localities of Calcutta and thus came to be known as Early Bengal Oils. Learn More
Hailing from Tripura, Dharmanarayan Dasgupta remained almost entirely within the fold of the Calcutta art world throughout his life. He trained at Santiniketan, from where he received his diploma in fine arts in 1961. Learn More
Born and brought up in Benaras, Biswanath Mukerji left home as a teenager to become an artist. From 1939-45, he studied at the Government School of Arts, Lucknow, under Asit Kumar Haldar, Lalit Mohan Sen, Hiranmoy Roychoudhuri, and Bireswar Sen. He learnt to paint watercolours in the wash technique under Haldar, who himself had trained under Abandindranath Tagore. Learn More
Recognised as India’s first pop artist, Bhupen Khakhar graduated as a chartered accountant in 1960. He began painting in the early 1960s after joining a course in art criticism at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M. S. University, Baroda, at the behest of the leading Baroda artist Gulammohamed Sheikh. Learn More