Untitled

Devi Prasad Roy Choudhury is one of the most well-known Indian sculptors of the twentieth century. He was also a painter, writer, teacher and institution-builder, closely associated with many late-colonial and postcolonial art academies, including the government art school in Madras (now Chennai) and the Lalit Kala Akademi. He learnt from Abanindranath Tagore—a pioneering twentieth-century Indian artist and active proponent of nationalist revivalist art, who was the founder of what came to be known as the Bengal School—as well as European teachers, leading him to develop a unique synthesis between deliberate orientalist styles and western, realist idioms. In this delicate gouache and ink work on paper, he demonstrates his easy mastery of a poetic realism that could be employed to depict dream-like spaces in states of decline, like this country seat that appears to be on the verge of being re-claimed by its natural surroundings.