Poster Colour on Paper

Signed & Dated Lower Left

Year - 1952

9.5 x 6 in.

Satish Sinha occupies an important position in early twentieth-century Calcutta as a realist painter who consciously moved away from the revivalist aesthetics of the Bengal School toward a more observational and academically grounded practice. Trained at the Government School of Art, Calcutta, under Abanindranath Tagore, and later influenced by Percy Brown and Jamini Prakash Ganguly, Sinha belonged to a generation of artists—including Jamini Roy and Atul Bose—who gradually distanced themselves from nationalist symbolism in favour of direct engagement with everyday life.

Although economic circumstances forced him to interrupt his formal education, Sinha continued to study privately and worked extensively as an illustrator for Bengali journals such as Basumati. His exposure to realist training was further strengthened through his association with Hemendranath Mazumdar at the Jubilee Art Academy. By the 1930s and 1940s, Sinha had developed a distinctive realist idiom characterised by  an empathetic portrayal of ordinary subjects. In later years, he returned to institutional life as an educator, eventually becoming Principal of the Indian College of Art and Draughtsmanship, and served in administrative roles at the Lalit Kala Akademi.

Evening Prayer belongs to Sinha’s mature period, when his focus had narrowed to solitary figures depicted in moments of quiet introspection. The work portrays a standing male figure, identifiable as a fakir or ascetic, head bowed and absorbed in a private act of devotion. 

Such contemplative figures recur across Sinha’s oeuvre, particularly in his drawings and works on paper from the 1940s and early 1950s, including studies of fakirs, musicians, labourers, and displaced populations. Works on paper from this period are especially significant within Sinha’s practice, as they reflect his sustained commitment to realist figuration at a moment when Indian art was increasingly turning toward abstraction and modernist experimentation. While his works are represented in major public collections, including the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, signed and dated small-format works from the early 1950s remain relatively scarce.