A new showcase revisits the legacy of Kalighat painter Becharam Das Dutta
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. There is a tactile quality about Becharam Das Dutta’s paintings, be it the Narasimha Vishnu-Avatara or Shiva Panchanan. Created in watercolour and natural dye in the middle to late 19th century, these pats are an example of combining innovation with tradition.
As lithography presses came to Calcutta’s (now Kolkata) Battala area, some Kalighat painters began to include technology in their practice. Becharam Das Dutta—incidentally, one of the few pat artists known by name—was one of them. He became the earliest-known Kalighat painters in the 1850s-60s to create outlines using the lithographic printing process, which Dutta then handpainted in the pat style.
This schematic made the paintings resemble wooden toys. Dutta, whose work is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection in New York, US, is being brought under the spotlight in India as part of the fourth edition of DAG’s Iconic Masterpieces of Indian Modern Art series. Forty works, including these 19th-century Kalighat pats, will be shown at Art Mumbai, after which they will travel to Delhi in December.
Besides Dutta’s series, other works on showcase include paintings by Western artists such as Thomas Daniell, Company School artist Sita Ram, M.V. Dhurandhar, M .A .R. Chughtai, Jamini Roy, Nandalal Bose, Avinash Chandra, A.
Ramachandran, Chittoprasad. Madhvi Parekh, and more. “Two hundred years separate the earliest work in ‘Iconic 04’—Henry Singleton’s The Last Effort and Fall of Tippoo Sultaun (c.
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