A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c16.s9.5

c16.s9.5

The preference commonly felt by modern European artists for realistic as compared with idealistic art finds frank expression in Mr. Percy Brown’s dictum that ‘the very highest form of fine art in India is to be met with in the terra-cotta statuettes made in Lucknow’.² This verdict is supported by reproductions of some terribly realistic figures of the victims of famine made for the Delhi Exhibition by Bhagwān Singh of Lucknow, ‘a modeller by caste and an artist by instinct,’ which the kindness of Sir G. Watt enables me to republish from the negative supplied by him (Pl. LXXXV). Not only do these figures image accurately the horrible facts as I have seen them, but they do something more, and suggest with moving vividness the emotions and sufferings hidden behind the visible physical appearances. The effigy of the skeleton son carrying the skeleton father pick-a-back opens up to the eye of imagination the whole sad story of extremest misery sanctified by intensest filial piety, and the other figures are hardly less suggestive of unrecorded tragedy. The man who could model forms so adequately expressive of the deepest emotions was no mean artist, and it is strange that he should have been content to waste his genius on petty, unregarded clay images, which, in all probability, have been ground to dust long ago, and would have been, like himself, utterly forgotten, but for the chance which enshrined them in an Exhibition catalogue. A philosophical Hindu, perhaps, would say that Bhagwān Singh deserved to be forgotten as a fit penalty for his realism. To the European he seems to be a lost spirit, who, in happier surroundings, might have become the founder of a school of sculptors and heir to undying fame. Images, like books, *habent sua fata*.