Untitled

Early Bengal oils are an important landmark in the overall history of India as they were the result of a seminal development in the life of the subcontinent—the arrival of European colonialists. The vast cultural churning unleashed by the disintegration of the Mughal empire and the rise to supremacy of the European trading companies created a class of art that borrowed technique, material and perspective from the Europeans but told stories that their Indian patrons knew best, as evident in a tale from Shiva mythology depicted in this Untitled work.