Never seen before painting by Sita Ram on view
DAG's exhibit at Art Mumbai (Nov 14-17) features rare Indian modern art, including a unique Sita Ram watercolor of a Muharram procession.
On view from November 14 to 17 at the Art Mumbai fair held at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse, DAG will be exhibiting their show titled ‘Iconic Masterpieces of Indian Modern Art,’ featuring rare works of Indian art.
The star of the show is a never seen before painting by the artist Sita Ram, a watercolour depicting a Muharram procession in Hazaribagh, Jharkhand, between the years of 1815 and 1825. It is not a large painting, by any means, just 11.5 x 17.5 inches, but brims with minute detail of the procession in the memory of the martyrdom of the grandson of the prophet, Hussain, commemorated by the Shia Muslims, replete with elephants, standards, horses, infantry, attendants and musicians.
“Its distinctive style—often called the Company style or school—was one of the happier outcomes of the Indo-European interaction in the Indian subcontinent,” wrote Mrinalini Venkateswaran for a companion essay with the piece. “Artists applied their traditional painterly skills to the new medium of watercolour to create work in a ‘Western’ style, resulting in remarkable paintings like this one.”
What was known of Sita Ram’s oeuvre was restricted to 220 paintings he created while traveling with the Marquess of Hastings, before more of his work started to be found in the 1970s.
Other painting of note on view are by Henry Singleton depicting the killing of Tipu Sultan, M. V. Dhurandhar’s painting At Chowpatty Beach, and Chittaprosad Bhattacharya’s scathing drawing of the Bengal famine, among others.