Portrait of a gentleman

Unlike Amrita Sher-Gil's feisty self portraits, Dhurandhar's are more sombre in comparison

Rarely has an artist done as many self-portraits as Vincent van Gogh, the reason perhaps to continue to perfect his form despite an inability to bag commissions, with many of the portraits being similar even when painted years apart. The most compelling feature in those portraits are van Gogh's eyes in which one can read a hopelessness at his situation. A century and more later at least some among them are now counted as the most expensive paintings in the world.

In India, Amrita Sher-Gil's feisty self-portraits, a few in the nude, form a fair percentage of her oeuvre, but a life interrupted before she turned 30 put paid to the numbers as a whole. But they show an artist at the top of her form and charged with life, unlike those of her senior, M V Dhurandhar, that doyenne of the Bombay Presidency who might easily outnumber van Gogh's profligacy, so profusely did he paint himself over the decades, but which portraits are sombre in comparison. Clearly, Dhurandhar was an outcome of his age when, like his subjects, he might have styled himself in the manner of 'a portrait of a gentleman'. We see the dark hair of his youth and formal coats giving way to a receding hairline and Indian headgear before the emergence of a shining pate and casual kurtas - a life's journey encapsuled in oil, linseed and canvas. As a highly regarded portrait painter, Dhurandhar also mentored acolytes and students, some of whom also painted his portraits. Indeed, at one time it appeared that if artists were not doing portraits of Rabindranath Tagore, they were painting pictures of Dhurandhar (with the exception of those painting royal portraits).

Because exposure to Indian art remains low, we are unfamiliar with many of the works of even well-known artists, so the revelation that they did self-portraits of exceptional quality is hardly surprising. The arrival of photography had rendered the portrait redundant, and with it, largely, the self-portrait too. As a result, when artists were painting, or perhaps practicing, with their self-portraits, they could be experimental rather than merely representational. Mostly, though, they chose to be - cocky? These artistic expressions were unlikely to be intended for the market, so they took liberties that high art might not have permitted them. M F Husain continued to remain the exception, his own visage peppering many of his paintings throughout his career.

It might have been F N Souza who set off the trend when, like Amrita Sher-Gil, he painted himself in the altogether, though the comments at the time were less wholesome for our self-styled David. Other artists since have been more deprecatory about their physical selves but no less interesting on that account. Nothing depicts an artist as much as a self-portrait - a recent trend among contemporaries appears to be to interleaf their images within the canvas like a leit-motif - where they reveal themselves as fresh-eyed ingenues in the mould of Gopal Sanyal, or, indeed, gargoyle-like, as Souza preferred it.

In J Sultan Ali's self-portrait, for instance, the artist represents himself, brush in hand, his own works in the background, as a master of his craft. Jyoti Bhatt's self-portrait, in comparison, is simpler - reflecting, in some measure, the unfussiness of this Baroda-based artist. Through the latter half of the 20th century, self-portraits by Indian artists tended to be defined by expressive outlines. How strange then that they too should have reverted to a style that had already been mastered by Jamini Roy in Kolkata, even as his light-hearted expressionistic self-portraits recall a style that is in turn reminiscent of a tortured van Gogh in another country, in another century.

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated