Osian's Auction Catalogue Creative India Series 1 Bengal | December 2011

hemenDrAnATh mAzumDAr & The WesTern AcADemic sTyLe in BenGAL Lots 53 – 63 “The painterly eminence of Hemendranath, and he was very eminent in his days, mostly came to him for his excellent handling of the mediumwith the WesternAcademic tradition. His ability with portraiture was only surpassed by his unsurpassable ability to draw female nudes in which he has added an extra degree of charm by using wet clothes to accentuate the curves of the female forms. This was, and still is, an original approach of painting female nudes. Edward Degas used to observe his models in the toilet through the key-hole to discover uncommon postures not painted before. Hemendranath’s women coming out of their bath in wet-clothes also rank at par. His originality however rested with his own invention of doing female nudes with his own invention of doing female nudes with a rich content of ‘Romanticism’. He took even greater pains to paint female nudes in situations of romantic, and often depressed, overtones seldom witnessed before or after. Some of his more famous paintings tend to show a woman in distress, either forsaken by her lover in the prime of her youth or pondering over the end of life as symbolized by a skull held thoughtfully in her outstretched arm.” [Ratan Parimoo & Nalini Bhagwat, rpt. In Parimoo, Ratan & Sandip Sarkar [Eds.] [2009]. Historical Development of Contemporary Indian Art. New Delhi: Lalit Kala Akademi; pp.108-9]