National Gallery of Modern Art-Parikraman

Nandalal Bose

A Sketch from Album No. 83 9114 Nandalal Bose Pencil, pen & ink on paper

Nandalal had a strong affinity for sketching, his subjects being the surrounding environs, people in their everyday life or anything that he found fascinating. The fluid handling of the lines and their strong delineation in the calligraphic style gives a textured rendition to the body of the local carrying baskets across his shoulders and also accentuates his vigour and strength. Dinkar Kowshik in his article 'Drawings and Sketches of Nandalal in the book, "Nandalal Bose - A collection of Essays" has elucidated about the sketches of Nandalal in the words,"Nandalal's drawings are vast in number and varied in technical interest. He was indefatigable in his search for form and to the end of his life he remained a student. Whatever he saw, and wherever he went he recorded the flora and fauna, the people of the place, their dress, their carriages, the head-dresses, the landscape, the festivals, the architecture, and while doing that he went on attaining a felicity of expression. His drawings often on card size format turned into independent works of art; they were fresh and vivid because of their immediacy and rapport with felt reality. They were not preliminary sketches to be developed later into painting. In fact most of these drawings and sketches were an end in themselves. Their compositional relation to the blank space, their shrewd sense of observation, and their living organic quality make his sketches an end in themselves. Their compositional relation to the blank space, their shrewd sense of observation, and their living organic quality make his sketches far more absorbing aesthetically than many of his finished paintings."