Jamini Roy, a noted Bengali artist, 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
Kolkata and enrolled there in the Government 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, Kolkata. 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 his 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. Jamini Roy died in 1972 at Kolkata.
