JAMINI ROY (1887 – 1972)
Born in 1887 in a small village in Beliatore, Bankura district, West Bengal, Jamini Roy joined the Government School of Art, Kolkata in 1903. He began his career by painting in the Post-Impressionist genre of landscapes and portraits, very much in keeping with his training in a British academic system, but by his late 30s began experimenting with the Kalighat Pat (Kalighat painting), which was a style of art with bold sweeping brush-strokes. He eventually forged the style of modern painting for which he is best known, a successful reinterpretation of traditional South Asian iconography by way of crisp, clean, modernist lines. He went on to become one of the most celebrated modernists in the history of Indian painting. The mother and child, Radha, and animals were painted in simple two-dimensional forms, with flat colour application and an emphasis on the lines. The main subjects were often enclosed within decorative borders with motifs in the background. The figure of the Christ was also a subject that Roy often painted. By the early 1930s, Roy made a complete switch to indigenous materials to paint on woven mats, cloth and wood coated with lime. The inspiration for painting on woven mats was the textures he found in Byzantine art, which he had seen in colour photographs. It occurred to him that painting on a woven mat might make for an interesting mosaic-like surface.
 
His paintings were first exhibited at the art school in Kolkata in 1929, and the artist also had notable solo exhibitions in London in 1946 and in New York in 1953 among other numerous solo and group shows. His works can be found in several private and public collections, institutions and museums all over the world, including the Lalit Kala Academi in Delhi and museums in Germany and the United States of America.
 
Jamini Roy was honored with the Padma Bhushan in 1955. He died in 1972 in Kolkata, where he had lived all his life, at the age of 85, a celebrated and revolutionary artist.