In this 2005 painting, M.F. Husain presents a group of overlapping, fragmented bodies in motion, reminiscent of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. Like Delacroix’s composition, Husain organizes the figures in a diagonal sweep, with one prominent female form near the center leading or rising above others, creating a similar sense of collective motion and unrest. 

His characteristic application of saturated red, ochre, black, and green outlined with dark contours, build simplified, distorted anatomy. The line remains the defining element in this painting. Rooted in his early exposure to calligraphy, Husain's line is both structural and expressive.This painting reflects Husain’s lasting interest in form, rhythm, and cultural hybridity, showing how he integrated multiple artistic traditions into a style that remained distinctively his own.

This early 19th-century Bengal oil painting—often referred to as a “Dutch Bengal” style—reveals the merging of indigenous mythological content with colonial artistic conventions. The work portrays a formidable Goddess Kali riding a lion into battle, surrounded by armies and celestial chaos. Though loosely inspired by puranic episodes like the slaying of Chanda and Munda from the Durga Saptashati, the figures here are not asuras but organized troops, suggesting a metaphorical retelling of real historical conflicts. The painter, likely anonymous, adopts compositional cues from British academic realism but filters them through local narrative traditions. Such works reflect early experiments in cultural amalgamation during colonial rule, where divine imagery was often evoked to process collective memory and trauma. In this case, Kali becomes an emblem of Shakti and resistance, possibly recalling Bengal’s 18th-century Maratha invasions or evoking nationalist sentiment through the mythic symbolism of divine justice and regional defense.

A seminal figure of the Bengal School, Nandalal Bose played a pivotal role in shaping a modern Indian aesthetic rooted in indigenous traditions. This undated tempera work demonstrates Bose’s mastery of ornament, design, and narrative restraint. A solitary woman, rendered in profile, stands against a richly foliated backdrop—her stylized posture and serene expression evoking the archetypal nayika, a classical heroine of Indian poetics.

The composition draws deeply from Mughal and Rajasthani miniature idioms, particularly in its intricate detailing of flora and patterned ground. His encounter with Japanese painter Arai Kampo in 1916 further sharpened his approach to line and brushwork, evident here in the calligraphic refinement of form.

This image underscores Bose’s interpretation and consolidation of Abanindranath Tagore’s artistic ideals.The painting reanimates India’s classical past not as pastiche, but as a contemplative space where mythic time and nationalist imagination converge. 

In the early 1900s, encouraged by E.B. Havell, Abanindranath Tagore turned to Mughal and Pahari miniature traditions, seeking to develop an indigenous Indian art form. His encounter with Japanese artists Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunso in 1903 introduced him to a new aesthetic — dissolving forms within atmospheric space — that deeply influenced his work. In Diwali (Festival of Lamps), the soft, veiled background and the lyrical glow around the lamp reflect this Japanese influence, while the naturalism and detailed rendering of the figure continue his engagement with Mughal refinement.

This print was produced in the Koka woodcut technique, introduced to Santiniketan by Biswarup Bose following his training in Japan. Only a few color prints were made from paintings by Abanindranath and Nandalal Bose, preserving key examples of early modernist innovation in India. The image captures the transition in Abanindranath’s style from defined form to suggestive mood, echoing his growing interest in atmosphere, restraint, and emotional resonance

Trained under both Nandalal Bose and Abanindranath Tagore at the Indian Society of Oriental Art, Indu Gupta emerged as a skilled artist with a subtle yet evocative style. This wash painting captures a lone woman, viewed from behind, leaning pensively against a stark architectural interior. The delicate modelling of her form—graceful posture, bare back, and soft drapery—evokes a quiet introspection, rendered with Gupta’s refined control of tonal gradation. Though better known for works influenced by the Bengal Famine, this piece offers a more contemplative lens into domestic solitude. Gupta’s artistic contributions spanned portraits, landscapes, and imaginative compositions, with works published in periodicals like Bharatbarsha, Prabashi, and Basumati. His famine illustrations, marked by empathy and expressive restraint, were widely appreciated by contemporaries such as Sarojini Naidu and Sucheta Kripalani. This painting reflects the artist’s ability to infuse the everyday with a muted emotional resonance. 

Bhupen Khakhar’s engagement with landscape was shaped by a deep interest in everyday urban life and vernacular visual cultures. Born in Bombay and later based in Baroda, Khakhar drew on his surroundings—lanes, shrines, and modest buildings—to construct pictorial worlds that were both observational and imaginative. His exposure to Sienese painting, Indian miniature traditions, and devotional imagery helped him evolve a distinctive style.

This undated watercolour presents a built landscape—likely religious in nature—rendered with loose washes and flat planes of colour. Though devoid of human figures, the composition resonates with Khakhar’s characteristic visual idiom: a curious, affectionate gaze cast on provincial urban spaces. Through a series of fluid washes, the image acquires a weightless quality, its forms drifting gently in an unanchored pictorial space. In works such as this, Khakhar’s representational idiom becomes quieter, yet no less attentive, capturing the layered textures of place without the distraction of narrative.

In Village Mela, Madhvi Parekh conjures a world alive with movement and multiplicity. Figures float, play, converse, and observe—each suspended in acts both ordinary and theatrical. The surface is intricately worked, with crosshatched textures that bind land, sky, and form into a single, pulsating field.

Parekh’s distinctive figuration—mask-like faces, elongated limbs, and stylised postures—creates a rhythm of repetition and variation, echoing the visual language of storytelling traditions. The composition resists fixed hierarchies; instead, it unfolds laterally, inviting the viewer to read the canvas as a field of simultaneous happenings. Animals, trees, and human figures interlock within this festive ecology, Village Mela is less a depiction than an evocation—a theatre of collective life imagined through the lens of memory, observation, and quiet invention.

Reba Hore (1926–2008) was a significant figure in post-independence Indian art, whose work emerged from a lifelong engagement with political and personal realities. A member of the Communist Party since 1948 and a witness to the Bengal famine, her practice was shaped by empathy, resistance, and introspection. These canvases, alive with colour and gesture, suggest moments of intensity—emotional, fleeting, and perhaps unresolved. In her own words, her art is “dependent on emotions... a result of conscious and subconscious attempts.” Rooted in everyday life and the artist’s surroundings—whether Kolkata, Delhi, or Santiniketan—her paintings carry traces of inner turbulence and quiet reflection, rendered through a visual language at once spontaneous and contemplative.

In this vibrant composition by Arpita Singh, female figures inhabit a dreamlike blue field—walking, reclining, gathered in groups or deep in thought. A large red form dominates the centre, disrupting the painting’s scale and symmetry. While Singh draws from miniature and folk idioms, she destabilizes decorative harmony through surreal elements and charged emotional cues.

Singh’s use of the female form challenges viewers to confront assumptions of femininity and modesty. Gestures of care—mothers with daughters, women in quiet communion—intertwine with satire and discomfort, exposing the vulnerability and strength of everyday womanhood. Her figuration reveals an interior world shaped by cultural memory, desire, and disillusionment, asserting a feminist voice deeply attuned to the contradictions of contemporary life.

A foundational figure in Indian modernism, B.C. Sanyal played a key role in shaping art education and institutions across both pre- and post-Independence India. Trained under Percy Brown and Jamini Ganguli at the Mayo School in Lahore, Sanyal brought structure, emotional depth, and a socially conscious sensibility to his practice—marked by expressive color, simplified form, and a persistent interest in the human condition.

Painted during the political instability of 1979, Our Politicians (Facing the Camera) presents a theatrical tableau of smiling political figures, reduced to hollow-eyed caricatures. Their exaggerated expressions and rigid postures parody the performative nature of public life, evoking official portraiture and propaganda imagery. While early influences included the Bengal School, Sanyal moved towards a visual language grounded in observation. This work reflects his mature approach—combining economy of form with pointed critique, capturing a moment of national disillusionment with clarity and restraint.

This pencil drawing by Amrita Sher-Gil is one of her many self-portraits, a format she returned to frequently throughout her career. Having trained at institutions such as the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, Sher-Gil developed a strong foundation in academic figuration, with a marked preference for the human form over still life or landscape.

In her self-portraits, Sher-Gil used her body not as a passive subject but as a site of agency and introspection. This particular work reveals a focused study of her facial features, marked by sculptural shading and precise contouring. She often challenged the conventions of feminine representation, using her gaze and posture to assert control over how she was viewed. Through such works, Sher-Gil constructed a nuanced visual identity—at once personal and political. Her self-portraits became a means of shaping her modern subjectivity, rooted in both introspective inquiry and a feminist defiance of inherited visual codes.

 In this work, Rabindranath Tagore explores the human visage, a theme that dominates much of his artistic oeuvre. Faces, evoking both mask and portrait, embody a transitional phase in Tagore’s art where invented forms gradually gave way to more representational imagery. His early engagement with mask-making traditions—especially after encounters with Indonesian and Japanese performances—shaped his approach to the face as a self-contained symbol of character and mood. Rather than extreme physiognomic exaggeration, Tagore retained a degree of naturalism, allowing his figures to hover between the typal and the individualized. Rendered with broad gestures and lyrical abstraction, this drawing underscore Tagore’s unique negotiation between invention and observation during his prolific artistic period of the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Bikash Bhattacharjee's painting from 1989 presents an image of unsettling quietude—a woman stands before a looming, cloud-like form that blurs the boundary between natural phenomena and psychological unrest. The composition's surreal atmosphere is characteristic of Bhattacharjee’s figurative realism, where the seen world is infused with layers of symbolic tension.

His portraits of anonymous individuals often bear haunting features—vacant or exaggerated eyes, ambiguous expressions—evoking a critique of contemporary society’s moral and psychological disintegration. Deeply influenced by masters such as Rembrandt and Goya, and modernists like Degas and Magritte, Bhattacharjee reimagined realism to render not just the likeness but the inner disquiet of post-independence Indian life. As Paritosh Sen observed, his figures are not portraits but symbols—mirrors of a society grappling with eroded values.

Souza’s portraits of women often served as spaces of contrast to the grotesque, fevered energy that defined his portrayals of men. In these two oils from the 1980s, the female figure emerges not as villain or victim, but as a curious construction — part muse, part cipher — rendered with indulgent affection and a hedonistic charm. 

Souza’s women from the 1950s onwards were frequently imagined as contemporary and European, dislocated from the earlier influence of Indian classical sculpture but never stripped of their sensuality. The 1987 work, frontal and icon-like, evokes the imprint of Georges Rouault. The 1981 painting, by contrast, is executed in a rougher, more expressionistic vein, the brushwork active and volatile, echoing his long-standing engagement with painters like Soutine and Picasso. In these paintings from the 1980s, Souza’s Expressionist inheritance is palpable.