Ram Kumar was an essential part of the first generation of post-colonial Indian artists.  He was born in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh in 1924 and was a member of the Bombay Progressive Artists Group along with other popular artists like Husain, Raza, and Sadanand Bakre.

Born in 1958 in Calcutta, Sanjay Bhattacharya was the youngest of four children. After finishing school, he decided to join the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Calcutta in 1977. When he graduated, he freelanced for work while experimenting with watercolors and put up his first art exhibition. Bhattacharya’s works show exquisite detail and form as well as play with light and shade creating a sense of realism.

This fine chest on stand displays an attractive wood grain with contrasting ebony borders, a brass hinged rectangular top, and twin locks. The chest rests on a stepped plinth with two short drawers, each with two ebony knobs and an attractive inlaid apron resting on four turned feet.

Jyoti Bhatt was born in 1934 in Bhavnagar, Gujarat and he was trained in painting and printmaking at MSU Baroda. He was one of the founder members of the Center of Photography in Baroda. Before he worked as a photographer, he dabbled in painting for a while. The canvas was traded with a camera and he started his career in 1967. He traveled to Gujarat where he photographed a wide range of folk art and craft.

B. Vithal was born in Maharashtra in 1935. He studied at the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai and secured a diploma in sculpture. There he excelled in the live model studio classes and the emphasis on the study of the human form. Although he is well known for his sculptures, he excelled in painting the human form as well.

Prabhakar Kolte was born in 1946 and received his diploma from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai in 1968. Kolte’s technique involved weathering his stronger colors, adding touches of another color to the canvas. His works usually have a single color in the background on which lighter colors are placed.

Shyamal Dutta Ray, born in 1935 in Bihar is known for his melancholic and dark watercolor works. Ray studied at the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Calcutta. He also founded the Society of Contemporary Artists, an artists' collective, that sought to introduce a new style into the Indian art world in the 1960s.

Prabhakar Barwe studied art at Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay. His fascination with the abstract form, drawn from the style and the concepts of Bauhaus, was reflected in his early watercolors and later works with floating motifs on a transparent surface. Barwe rejected both the British academic tradition-dictated artistic models in Indian figurative art and the Indian miniature form to evolve a universal, abstract visual language that explored inward spaces and transient realities.

Born in 1921 in Chittagong, undivided India, Somnath Hore studied at the Government Art College in Calcutta. His works represent the turbulent lives at the time of the Bengal Famine of 1943. His pictorial language in his sketches, sculptures and prints is a reaction to one of the major crisis’ that hit Bengal in the 20th century. His etchings represent a time when he moved on from semi representational works to abstract works. The viscosity technique utilizes a combination of relief printmaking and intaglio printmaking methods to create a multicolored print.

Born in 1914, K. H. Ara, a founder member of the Progressive Artists’ Group, evolved his trademark style, through nudes and still-life paintings. He was a modernist for whom the form and language of art preceded all other social and political motivations. This evolved a certain eclecticism which led him in an exploration of his own style.