Sardar Ganda Thakar Singh

Bonhams London, 12 June 2001, lot 24

Celebrated Indian painter, S. G. Thakar Singh was born in a small village outside Amritsar in 1899. He began his career working for theatrical companies in Bombay and Calcutta but soon became renowned for his painting. In 1917, aged just eighteen, Thakar Singh won a Rs. 500 prize in an exhibition in Simla, and in 1924, was awarded second prize at the British Empire Exhibition in London. Two years later, the artist co-founded the Punjab Fine Art Society in Calcutta, and then in 1931, he established the Thakar Singh School of Arts in his hometown of Amritsar. Working mainly in oils, pastels and watercolors, Thakar Singh’s beautiful, yet academic works evince a delicate and skillful understanding of his medium. This mastery is strikingly illustrated in the intricate stone reliefs and draping folds of the subject’s sari in the current lot.