Narayan Shridhar Bendre

This charming canvas is quintessential of Narayan Shridhar Bendre’s artistic project – to paint the unadorned beauty of his surroundings. From the late 1960s, the artist’s principal subject was rural women, shown undertaking domestic tasks or creative pursuits such as reading, painting and playing music. This subject, paired with Bendre’s subtle yet masterful use of colour and brushwork, came to define the artist’s much-celebrated œuvre, and is tenderly depicted in the current work, Pancham, from 1991. 

‘Pancham’ is the note that tunes the sitar to the right scale and the woman of Bendre's Pancham is shown tuning her instrument to the pitch of the nightingale, a bird known for its beautiful and sonorous song and which sits faithfully before her. Painted late in his career, Bendre no longer deploys the pointillist style of his earlier works but rather paints with flat areas of colour with softly blurred passages, lending a candid simplicity to the scene. The understated palette and lack of minute details focus the viewer’s attention on the endearing subject depicted and allows one’s mind to fill with the trills and whistles of the nightingale.

'There is already a lot of misery in this world, I do not want to add to it. I paint because I derive pleasure from painting and I try to give pleasure to others. That is my philosophy of art.'

- Narayan Shridhar Bendre

(A. Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai, 2005, p. 19)