Jamini Roy, a versatile genius and the legendary artist of Bengal, played a role of profound significance by his aesthetic adventure and left a permanent and distinguished place in Indian painting. He excelled in the art of composition and renewed the pictorial art, which gave modern painting a new meaning and a new life.

Jamini Roy was born in April 1887 in the village of Beliatore in Bankura district of West Bengal and passed his childhood amid the living rural art of Bengal. Both the family tradition and the surroundings where he grew up greatly influenced his artistic career. Besides primitive mode of life of the Santal and their simple art, Jamini Roy was greatly impressed by the work of the village craftsmen like the potter, the carpenter, the blacksmith, the clay modeler and above all the patua and also the alpana or simple artistic rice paste drawing of rural women which kindled his interest in form and design. It was from these village craftsmen that he learnt the importance of the fundamental line and the expressive contours, which formed the keynote of his painting. The paintings of Jamini Roy portraying the essence of folk and art and also sophistication are remarkable for the inherent poise and vitality as well as simplicity of design, directness and linear rhythm.

In 1903 at the age of sixteen Jamini Roy joined the Government School of Art in Kolkata and came in contact with Abanindranath Tagore and Percy Brown, the then Principal of the institution. Impressed by his talent Percy Brown allowed him to attend any class of the Art School and to exhibit some of his paintings in the Classroom. Encouragement of Percy Brown was an asset in the artistic career of Jamini Roy.

The western academic training has helped him to attain a mastery of draughtsmanship and the maturity for the realization of his artistic ends. Jamini Roy had a checkered life and he utilized his various experiences for the development of his career as a painter, which included plate retouching in the press at Allahabad, making of greeting cards for a Jewish trader, working in a lithographic press, coloring cheap woodcuts for a press at Battala or a sales man at clothshop. His theatrical experience also helped him to realize the difference between reality and illusion and to portray the real image of man from distance.

His career as a painter started with portraiture. The realistic portraits of rich persons in oil revealed his technical mastery in western academic training and soon Jamini Roy earned a reputation as a professional painter in the Kolkata art world. His portraits and nude studies reflect the art tradition of Alma Tadema, Rembrandt and Sargent. During 1920-30 Jamini Roy made many portraits and landscapes in the style of Cezzane, Van Gogh, Van Dyck and Modigliani. He was greatly inspired by bright colors of Van Gogh’s paintings and he made several copies of them. These realistic portraits and landscapes brought name, fame and prosperity for Jamini Roy. ‘Plaughman’, ‘At sunset prayer’, ‘Van Gogh’, ‘Self Portrait with Van Dyck beard’, ‘Baul’, ‘Toilet’ are some of the important examples of the early works of Jamini Roy.

But soon Jamini Roy was tired of making portraits. The western technique of paintings as well as style of Bengal school initiated by Abanindranath did not evoke any interest in his mind. He gradually felt that painting in oil was not his own medium. It appeared to him that merely copying the western art he would neither achieve mastery of European painting nor that of truly Indian. This realization, the turning point in his life, came at the age of thirty four in 1921. The first and foremost intention of Jamini Roy was that the form and color of his paintings would be completely different from contemporary style. Thus Jamini Roy started intelligence adventure for the search of pure form and line. He plunged into experimentation.

After the academic training in the Calcutta School of Art in the early 1920s, some of his works bore residues of the Bengal School mannerisms. He made some brilliant forays into a Post-Impressionist genre of landscapes and portraits, yet his early career was calamitous. He endured extreme poverty and his work was lack-lustre and banal. Disheartened, he began a wrenched journey to discover his own true style, undertaking odd jobs to survive. Jamini Roy discovered the answer to his predicament right in rural Bengal, in Kalighat paintings, the popular bazaar paintings sold outside the Kalighat temple in Kolkata.

The national spirit, the Swadeshi movement of nineteen twenties, also contributed towards a change in the artist’s attitude to a great extent. He realized that an artist cannot attain mastery in his work of creation without social consciousness and intimate knowledge and understanding of the living tradition. In his search for true expression of art he also tried his hand in Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan thanka style. But the real answer to his inner quest Jamini Roy found in the folk art of Bengal in dolls and toys, in scrolls and patas which illustrate the simplicity of expression, symbolic quality and purity of form of the Indian art. He came back to the original foundations of his artistic experience, symbolic quality and purity of form of the Indian art. He came back to the original foundations of his artistic experience, the art of the village craftsmen. He realized that the elemental truth of art has been best illustrated by the work of the patuas and by the village craftsmen where form and technique are very simple and easily communicative.

In 1925, he began experimenting along the lines of the Kalighat idiom, and by the early 1930s he had made a complete switch to indigenous materials. His fascination with the indigenous art of Kalighat painting and the terracotta’s of the Vishnupur temple, grew unabated. Quietly, yet firmly, the bold simplicity, linear flow began to suffuse his work. In his mid-thirties, he abandoned his tame and conventional art practice. He abandoned the canvas and made his own painting surfaces out of cloth, wood, even mats coated with lime, and painted using earth and vegetable colours. The 1930's saw the beginning of his scintillating career, which spanned well into the 60’s.

It is undeniable that his early academic training in European tradition had laid the foundation of his artistic developments. But Jamini Roy had skillfully utilized his training and made a happy integration of two trends, a synthesis of western idiom and technique with Indian theme and rhythmic quality. After a long period of formal experiment Jamini Roy succeeded to create a new style, a new form of expression with vivid lines and colors inspired by the tradition and techniques of folk art. He achieved his ultimate goal based on extreme simplification and concentration on essentials. He freed his style, form and color from the conventional artistic bonds and ushered a new era in the trend of modern art.

As in primitive art Jamini Roy also wanted to depict the very essence, the inner reality of the object. The innumerable variations of forms and the structural distortions in the paintings of Jamini Roy have been derived from the different sources of the folk art of Bengal like terracotta plaques of the temples of Bankura, wooden figures, alhadi putul or mummy dolls, and clay models of animals and folk paintings like jadupata, jaranopata, and Kalighat pata etc. His group studies look like panel friezes which are replete with same figures in the same figures in the style of relief sculpture.

His choice of subjects was rich and inexhaustive. In the early phase he painted many European subjects, landscapes and portraits. Later his subject matter was completely changed. He chose his theme from the people around him. Apart from the mythological scenes from the ‘Ramayana’ and the ‘Krishnalila’ and gods and goddesses it was the village cultivators, the carpenters, blacksmiths, Santal men and women, bauls, fakirs and Vaishnava singers which constituted his main subjects of painting. Jamini Roy never depicted any shrewd woman and seldom depicted violent scenes. Women finds important place in paintings of Jamini Roy. Probably no other artist in India has delineated this theme with so much affection and gracefully as Jamini Roy did. His study of woman depicted her in motherly aspect, as villager and as devotee or sophisticated women. But, of these, he has shown particular attention to the manifestation of women as mother. Innumerable paintings and drawings were done by him to represent the different moods of mother. In 1935 Jamini Roy was awarded Viceroy’s gold medal for his painting ‘mother helping the child to cross a pool’.

The paintings of Jamini Roy are noteworthy for their linear rhythm and attractive color composition. He wanted that the message of his painting with evocative line and simple form would be direct to the viewer and understandable to all. His search and experiments for purer line and abstract form resulted in the brush drawings in lamp black and were best illustrated in the studies of Christ and the mother and son. The paintings with supple terse line, bold coloring and the absence of ornamental details at once concentrate our attention solely on the figure of the central dynamic point of the composition.

The thick precise outline as well as multi-colored line enclosing the figures and bright shining white eyes recall to our mind the traditional patachitra and Santal patas of Bengal as well as mural paintings of Europe, France and Spain. Another notable feature is that the frame, the surrounding border became a part of the picture. In painting human figure Jamini Roy paid much attention to its overall design than to the expression of his face.

Jamini Roy used yellow and white to infuse light in his painting. Some of his paintings betray the technique and different features of the art traditions of various countries. His unending search for new form and color inspired his mosaic paintings.

Jamini Roy’s presentation of ‘Santhal’ drummers, toiling blacksmith, ‘Krishna-Balaram’ and women figures like ‘Radha’, ‘Gopi’, ‘Pujarini’ and ‘Virgin and Child’ became very popular during the 1940s and his collectors included the middle-class Bengalis as well as the European community. His work was exhibited in London in 1946 and in New York in 1953. He was honored with the State award of ‘Padma Bhushan’ in 1955.

The pen and ink sketches of Jamini Roy are unique and as important as his paintings. Jamini Roy drew these sketches as layouts for his painting. All his sketches enclosed by frame are simple, concise and accentuated with plastic quality. Jamini Roy, the gifted artist of Bengal and originator of a new style died at the age of eighty five in 1972. He left behind a large number of magnificent paintings with dramatic and dynamic delineation, a source of joy and tranquility to the posterity.

The Indian Museum, Kolkata possesses an interesting collection of the paintings and drawings of Jamini Roy representing some beautiful examples of his style.