Page 55 - Eye of the beholder

J. P GanGooly [1876-1953]
Gangooly’s reputation lay in his skilled dexterity in rendering realistic and naturalistic painting that included mythological subjects as well as landscapes and river scapes. He was also a sensitive portraitist rendering his sitters with incisive precision. This was the consequences of his essential training in oils from English and Bengali artists, resulting in making him integral to the formation of the new professional artists in colonial India. In a sense Gangooly was privately tutored and not a product of the Calcutta School of Art. He practiced his art during the late 19th century to the early 20th century. But his visibility was hampered due to the consequences of nationalist and Neo Bengal Art Movements that took prominence in the first decade of the 20th century.
Gangooly was born in Jorasanko Thakurbari in Calcutta, the aristocratic household of the Tagore’s. From a young age he showed predilection towards art and was privately tutored by the English artist Charles Palmer, whose art training was from South Kensington. In addition he also received tutoring from Olito Ghilardi and Gangadhar Dey and later from his uncle Abanindranath Tagore. Gangooly consciously and with intense interest completed his training under Palmer, and mastered the art of rendering chiaroscuro or modelling in light and shade with impressive brushwork that manifested later in his favored genre of landscapes and river scapes. He further developed and perfected his skills in oil painting and exhibited his virtuosity by rendering atmospheric river scapes creating moods and romantic scenes of peasant life. He illustrated the Sanskrit play Kadambari by Banabhatta, which he dramatized on the model of European History paintings. These illustrations by Gangooly were much appreciated by Rabindranath Tagore, who argued for a case of developing in India a new genre of history paintings, but by gleaning out subject matter and themes from mythology and classical literature. Tagore in taking up the cudgels for Gangooly not only aided him in establishing his Western style oil painting as an epitome of naturalism, but also drawing his themes and subjects from the rich reserve of pictorial images inherent in ancient Sanskrit literature. Tagore felt that ‘picturesque’ images and metaphors in the passages of Kadambari that Gangooly had illustrated were appropriate that translated with ease into visual forms.
Gangooly’s rendering of themes particularly derived from Sanskrit classics were premised on the style of academic naturalism with formats of European history paintings. In late 19th century in Calcutta a strong argument was centered on pictorial naturalism in art that was strongly supported by Balendranath Tagore, Ishwari Prasad and Rabindranath Tagore. At the turn of the century Gangooly’s works continued to flourish as a strong strand of Academic oils painting, which had acquired the strength of social and professional niche.
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