Manindra Bhushan Gupta was described by Nicholas Roerich as "an untiring seeker” having a "heroic understanding of the paths of ascent". It aptly describes the artist who spent his entire life in the pursuit of art. The present lot is one such rendition from his extensive output.

An illustrious student of Nandalal Bose at Kalabhavan in Santiniketan, Manindra was fortunate to have compeers like Binod Behari Mukherjee, Ramkinkar Baij, Dhirendra Krishna Dev Burman, Ramendranath Chakravarty and Satyendranath Bandopaddhaya. On Nandalal’d urging they visited different parts of India and witnessed the vestiges of exquisite art and culture of ancient India. Fascinated by the capacitive old paintings, sculpture and architectural grandeur he witnessed at Nalanda, Rajgeer, Jaipur, Chitor and Udaipur Manindra felt enlightened to the core.

His acute interest in nature and the simple lives of santhals that he saw around him in Santiniketan inspired him to creat series of wash paintings on the distinctive Birbhum landscape dotted with tall chhatim and sonajhuri trees. The present lot captures such an atmosphere of idyllic beauty where we see a santhal woman filling water in a pot from the distant kopai river, a narrow rivulet that runs around the fringes of Santiniketan. The painting has an overall uniform tone of ochre yellow much in semblance to the rough sandbed seen around the river.