Mixed Media on Paper

12 x 8 In.

Signed Lower Left

Manishi Dey — younger brother of Mukul Dey — trained under Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose at Santiniketan, absorbing the wash technique and woodcut discipline central to early Bengal School practice. His first exhibition took place in Colombo in 1920, followed by a solo in Calcutta in 1928. Though frequently positioned within the Santiniketan lineage, contemporary accounts (Thacker & Venkatachalam, Present Day Painters of India, 1950) describe him as instinct-driven and temperamentally independent: painting in bursts, gifting works impulsively, and at times destroying them soon after completion. This volatility has contributed to the comparative scarcity of early works that survive.

The same volume records that N. S. Bendre — during his study travels across India — stayed with Dey specifically to observe his technique. This places Dey not only within the pedagogical descent from Abanindranath and Nandalal, but also as an artist whose working methods were of interest to peers who would themselves shape Indian modernism. His later decades in Bombay and Gwalior marked a decisive expansion of vocabulary: oils, tempera, rollers and spatula applied to surface with increasing abandon, moving far beyond orthodox Bengal idioms.

The present work belongs to the period in which the Santiniketan base remains visible — poised between early discipline and the broader experimentation that followed. Such transitional works are encountered less frequently today.