Sunil Madhav Sen

A member of the celebrated Calcutta Group, Sunil Madhav Sen was among the first ‘modern’ artists of both Bengal and the country as a whole. The Calcutta Group formed in 1943, four years before the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group, and were of great significance to the development of contemporary Indian art. Sunil Madhav Sen experimented with the folk traditions of his home and the Cubist and Expressionist aesthetics of the West, to produce his distinct fluid and spirited art style, as seen in the charming present works. A figurative watercolor by the artist has been part of the British Museum’s permanent collection since 1990 (1990,0707,0.10), and shows the same confident, striking use of line as seen in lots 80 and 81.