PROVENANCE : Acquired From a Delhi Based Collector
SIGNATURE DETAILS : Lower Left Details - Kansaripara Art Studio
Lower Middle Details- Shree Shree Gaurnitayi (written in Bengali and Hindi)
Lower Right Details - 26, Kristo Das Pal Lane, Calcutta

From the second half of the nineteenth century, mechanically reproduced prints began to be made in huge quantities in urban centres: Bombay and Pune followed the Raj capital, Calcutta, the three of them emerging as the principal hubs whose goods enjoyed India-wide dissemination. The urban need for affordable representations of Hindu gods and goddesses fueled the popularity of prints in Calcutta.

Village scroll painters (patua) were among the first to respond quickly to the demand, relocating to Calcutta (Kolkata) as the city became the focal point of British authority. They modified their expertise to make inexpensive portraits for pilgrims to the goddess Kali's shrine in Kalighat, on the outskirts of Calcutta.

As the demand for the paintings grew, the great artists hired women to color them on a massive scale. Artists from Kalighat, who were exposed to Western prints circulating in Calcutta, developed a unique hybrid iconography for Hindu deities that used Western illusionist tactics. In order to meet urban demand, Kalighat scroll painters (patua) opted to replicate pictures by hand. Other Calcutta artisans who had aided European artists in generating mechanically-replicated images realized the promise of print technology for producing large-scale graphics. In the Chitpur district of central Calcutta, the first prints were woodcuts, followed by metal engravings.

The adoption of this approach coincided with the wider penetration of illusionist painting into popular consciousness, resulting in a broader market. The Royal Lithographic Press was one of the first Bengali presses. Kristo Hurry Doss is a typical example of an artisan who has embraced the new method.

The Calcutta Art Studio, founded in 1878 by five former Government Art School students-Annada Bagchi, Nabakumar Biswas, Phanibhusan Sen, Krishna Chandra Pal, and Jagannath Mukhopadhaya-dominated the creation of popular lithographs in Bengal.

The brilliant and wide variety of colors, strong clear lines, delicate shading, and excellent quality of the lithographs marked a significant advance over black-and-white lithographs. Naturalism began with Kalighat, but the Calcutta Art Studio iconography, which is based on European academic art, triumphantly supplanted earlier ones. These prints were object lessons in creative anatomy studied at art school, as they sought inspiration for Hindu gods in powerful Greek forms rather than the thin Bengali man.

In the nineteenth century, lithography was one of the few art mediums that served both high and low art markets, and the artists of Kolkata who specialized in it did much to bring art to the public's attention and keep it there. As a popular art style, these painters were known for their use of vibrant color, simple subjects, and quick brushstrokes, which became the trademark of Kalighat painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.