Jamini Roy paintings from the collection of Chanchalkumar Chattopadhyay: The Friday Find

5 - 11 June 2026
Jamini Roy paintings from the collection of Chanchalkumar Chattopadhyay, The Friday Find

“Peace is not good for an artist, Art is born of experience, of stress and strain, wrestling with problems, intellectual, and physical.”

Jamini Roy

 

This week the Friday Find features a collection of works that are part of our upcoming exhibition South Asian Modern Art 2026, which opens at the gallery on Wednesday 10 June.  It’s slightly cheating, but the story behind these works is so interesting, and paintings from this particular period of the artist's career do not appear frequently, we felt it was a good focus for this week’s feature.

No images available.

  • Partha Mitter on the Origins of the Bengal School

    July 31, 2024

    Jamini Roy was one of the most significant artists of the early 20th century in India, heavily involved with artistic and literary figures in Calcutta, including those involved with the group Parachay.  In 2024 we exhibited an important collection of early Bengal School paintings from the collection of Norman Blount, treasurer of the Indian Society of Oriental Art. For that show we interviewed Professor Partha Mitter, who is a renowned expert on this period. The video is well worth watching.

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  • These works come from the private collection of poet and intellectual Chanchalkumar Chattopadhyay (1915-2004), who was part of this intellectual...
    Left to right: Bishnu Dey, J. Moitra, Chattopadhyay, Rathin Moitra

    These works come from the private collection of poet and intellectual Chanchalkumar Chattopadhyay (1915-2004), who was part of this intellectual community in Calcutta in the 1930s. Chattopadhyay was introduced to Jamini Roy by the writer, critic and academic Bishnu Dey (1909-1982), who himself was a fervent supporter of Roy and his work as one of the most significant artists of his time.

     

    ‘In his youth, he [Chattopahdyay] was part of a group of young men in Calcutta which included Samar Sen, the poet, Debiprosad Chattopadhyaya, the commentator on the atheist tradition in Indian philosophy, and his brother Kamakshi, poet, Jyotirindra Moitra, poet and singer, and Asok Mitra, the bureaucrat. Inspiring and guiding this circle of literary-minded young men was the poet Bishnu Dey, and further afield, the Parichay group. In the Thirties, apart from literature, it was opposition to fascism which inspired these young men as it did many others…’

    Obituary written by Rudrangshu Mukherjee, 2004

  • 'What is significant is that Chanchalkumar represented a special sensibility in the culture of Calcutta. He and other representatives of...
    Unfinished work depicting Rama, painted on the back of Pujarin.

    "What is significant is that Chanchalkumar represented a special sensibility in the culture of Calcutta. He and other representatives of this ambience drew sustenance from all that was aesthetically worthwhile in European culture. In so doing, they nurtured a cultural attitude and they were willing to undergo a certain amount of hardship and toil to carry out this nurturing.

     

     

    'Calcutta was never more globalized than it was in the late Thirties and through the Forties. Poets, writers and artists came together to form the Anti-fascists Writers’ Association. The creation of this platform came not from a shared political ideology but rather from a shared aesthetic sensibility. This intellectual globalization had no fanfare as its baggage. Three individuals listening to Bach on a Victrola in a poky little flat in Shyambazar felt themselves to be at one with the best in European culture.

     

     

    'World War II engendered a milieu in Calcutta that facilitated an amicable encounter between a particular kind of European mind and a rooted Bengali sensibility. In Bishnu Dey’s middle-class home near Lake Market, men as varied as E.M. Forster, Joseph Needham, J.B.S. Haldane, Louis Macneice, Verrier Elwin, WIlliam Archer, John Irwin and so on could walk in and feel comfortable discussing art, politics and literature with the poet and his younger friends."

  • “Here was perfect technique of brushstroke, beginning with a broad firm pressure of the brush and ending the curve with...

    “Here was perfect technique of brushstroke, beginning with a broad firm pressure of the brush and ending the curve with a light fine gradation. These simple figures were composed almost entirely of curves, the only straight line perhaps the line of the nose, or a sharp angle in the drapery of the Sari…

     

    Jamini carries out these themes in ash-grey line on a background graded from grey to white, giving the effect of figures emerging from a shadowy room or animals leaping across a wide plane.”

    E Mary-Milford, A Modern Primitive, Horizon Review of Literature and Art, London, Vol.X, No. 59, 1944

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