Oil on Canvas

16 x 20 In.

Dated Verso

Year - 1995

Reba Hore was born in Jessore in 1926 and trained at the Government College of Art & Craft, Calcutta, where she met Somnath Hore. Both lived through the Bengal famine, riots and Communist Party mobilisations — experiences that remained a psychological substrate in her work.

She lived and worked in Kolkata, Delhi and Santiniketan. Hore was an inward worker — using large canvases early on, later turning to wax-based encaustic when an oil allergy emerged in the 1970s.

After moving to Santiniketan (1967), her practice widened through contact with Kala Bhavan and its students, yet her paintings retained their humanist core: figures and scenes filtered through memory, fatigue, affection, grief, and the small urgencies of living. In 1983, Hore and her family moved to a modest house in Lalbandh, Santiniketan. Reba was busy with her paintings and terracottas. In later life, after Somnath Hore’s death, she continued to paint and write despite dimming eyesight — producing smaller, concentrated works.

The present 1995 canvas sits in this late arc of renewed oil-based work, after decades in which encaustic dominated. Its value lies not in scale but in survival — a work from a period when painting, writing and endurance had fused, and when each image held the weight of long practice, ageing, and continuity.