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Jamini Roy

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JAMINI ROY (1887-1972) born in Bengal, of a middle-class landowning family, he was sent at an early age to study at the Government School of Art, Calcutta and had his first exhibition there in 1929. In 1955 he was awarded the Padma Bhusan. He always worked in or near Calcutta, where he died in 1972. Jamini Roy was born in 1887 in a village of the Bankura district in West Bengal, an area especially rich with a folk art tradition. In 1903 with the consent of his father, he arrived in Calcutta and enrolled there in the Govt. School of Art. Despite his ready success, he had, by 1925, begun experimenting along the lines of popular bazaar paintings sold outside the Kalighat temple, Calcutta. By the early 1930s he had made a complete switch to indigenous materials, following the Kalighat idiom back to its source in the scroll paintings of the Bengal countryside. Roy's pictures become very popular during the 1940s and clientele included both the Bengali middle class and European community. In 1946, his work was exhibited in London; in 1953 in New York. He was honored with the State award of Padma Bhushan in 1955. He died in 1972 in Calcutta.