Osian's Auction Catalogue The Osianama Series |February 2013

111 1958-59 “His (D.P. Roy Choudhury) return to the Bengal school did indeed, paradoxically, connote a phenomenal departure from it, for he was to achieve that most rare synthesis of western craftsmanship and Indian idealism in the finest art. It was a daring experiment, extremely dangerous, and called for exceptional art knowledge and culture. A lesser man than Choudhury might have degraded the western technique and the Indian idealism, and conceived a hybrid monstrosity. He developed a singularly felicitous and individual style, adapting western art science to Indian conceptions. He discerned the truth and beauty in both. He is our first modern eclectic, our reformer in art. He suffers indeed from no westernphobia; he adopted the western science as the basic foundation of his artistic achievement...The composition, the colour sense and the design are all typically western; yet no western artist can attempt to paint his pictures...Choudhury’s range is versatile; his genius is manyfaceted. He is as Stella Kramrisch has said, the classic of the new generation of Indian artists. As a wizard of watercolour he has a solid continental reputation, and his mastery of the medium is unequalled in the country. Water colour is to him a romantic dreamland where he frolics, Comuslike, for the sheer joy of it and conjures up visions of powerful and impossible splendour. His subtle colours sing and dance in opalescent harmony; each due is masterfully distilled to its deepest glow. The subdued colour magic is compelling; it haunts. His watercolours have the depth and luminosity of oils, without their attendant heaviness. He ceaselessly experiments, ever seeking newer ranges of colour symphony. The tints blend and coalesce in perfect unison in deliberate compositions of rare originality, shuffled and reshuffled in his inventive brain.” – Rao, P.R. Ramachandra [1943]. Choudhury & His Art . Bombay: New Book Company; pp.3-5.