Cartoons, as they are now known, was introduced in Bengal in the 1870s  by the British expatriates emulating the famous London Punch. Soon this  new genre of art caught the imagination of educated Bengalis who found  a new medium to express their age old  talent of self-mockery.  Bengali  cartoonists pilloried the deficiencies and drawbacks of…

In the last decade of the 18th Century, the cultural interaction between local artists and their British and European patrons transformed indigenous Indian painting and led to a unique style that came to be known as the Company School This genre of art surfaced in a number of regions in India and Bengal was one…

Pankha literarily means a wing; in day-to-day parlance it also stands for a portable fan, made from palmyra.  But the term Pankha was in circulation in British Bengal conveying a special sense for a large swinging fan, fixed to the ceiling, connected by two symmetrical ropes and pulled by an operator during the hot and…

Bengal in the late eighteenth century was an unlikely destination for a young Flemish marine painter born to a prominent merchant family of Antwerp. But political unrest in Europe and the lure of fame and fortune led Francois Balthazar Solvyns (1760-1824) to arrive in Bengal in 1790. For the next thirteen years (from 1791 to…

The first quarter of the nineteenth century saw British authority deeply and extensively entrenched in India. Interest about the newly colonized land and its people went on increasing in the west. A large number of visiting artists from Britain and Europe took up their residence in Bengal and some of these artists interested themselves, not…

Jyotirindra Nath Tagore, one of Rabindranath’s older brothers, was the first to receive wide acclaim abroad for his artistic works when a folio of twenty-five pencil sketches by him was  published in London in 1915 The Tagore family of Bengal had no dearth of genius or talent, particularly in the field of art and literature.…

Following the East India Company’s rise to political power, an array of European painters, portraitists, miniaturists, engravers and lithographers came out to India. Like the British and European Merchants they sought fortune, fame and adventure. They were not disappointed in their pursuits as they made good money by painting portraits, both in oil and water,…