Page 20 - Pundole's Auction M0015

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PROPERTY OF AN IMPORTANT INDIAN COLLECTOR

BENJAMIN HUDSON

fl.?1847?–?1862

Portrait of Babu Keshub Chandra Gangooly

Oil on canvas
49? × 40 in. (126.7 × 101.5 cm.)
Signed ‘B. Hudson’ lower right

??10,00,000?–15,00,000

REGISTERED ANTIQUITY – NON-EXPORTABLE ITEM
(Please refer to the Terms and Conditions of Sale
at the back of the catalogue)

Pratap Chandra Sinha (the subject of the following lot)
and his brother Ishwar Chandra Sinha were well known
figures in their hometown of Kolkata. The Sinha family
commissioned the British artist Benjamin Hudson to create
several portraits for them after the artist arrived in Kolkata
in the mid 1850s, some of family members, and others
of important members of the local community. Hudson
arrived in Kolkata at a time when academic realism was
popular in India, but had fallen out of fashion in the West. He
lived in Kolkata and painted there for eight years, receiving
commissions from the traders of the East India Company,
Indian royals, and prominent Indian families such as the
Sinhas, which has been well documented in Kishore Singh’s
book on Indian Portraits. The brothers were responsible for
founding the Belgachhiya Theatre in 1858 which was in
the village of Belgachhiya in Kolkata. The first play staged at
the theatre was a Bangla translation of the Sanskrit play
Ratnavali, by Ramnarayan Tarkaratna. The subject of the
current painting, Keshub Chandra Gangooly, was a well-
known Bengali actor who acted in this play, as confirmed by
the black script titled Ratnavali that he holds in his left hand.
He also performed in the Bangla play titled Sharmistha,
written by Michael Madhusudan Dutt, that was staged at
the theatre on 3 September, 1859. It is quite likely that
Hudson met him through the theatre and had asked him to
pose for him.

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