Born in 1909, Pranay Ranjan Roy received training under eminent artists like Asit Kumar Haldar and L.M. Sen at the Government College of Arts and Craft, Lucknow. In the early phase of his illustrious career he followed the prevailing pictorial vocabulary of Bengal school which was an amalgamation of various indigenous schools of art like the pre and post Mughal miniature traditions among others.

However he soon developed a penchant for the unique naturalism of the 15th century Pre-Renaissance Art, when artists studied the natural world in order to perfect their understanding of such subjects as anatomy and perspective. This brought about a change not only in his stylistic approach but also in the thematic content of his paintings. This observation is well exemplified in this present lot 'The Musician & his Muse', a tribute to the aesthetic religion of the East and the West. In an idealized setting of pure bliss, appear two individuals – the musician and his divine muse. While the former plays a lyre and seems entranced in its tune; the latter dances to the emanating notes, her head slightly tilted toward it. The woman herself appears to bear an ethereal aura around her, mesmerizing her audience with her heavenly magnetism. The diaphanous quality of her garment lightly flows over her body and around and the adornments intensify her beauty, rather than stifling it from the human gaze. Her image brings to mind the immaculate beauty of Sandro Botticelli’s 'Birth of Venus'.

The fusion of several aesthetic styles gives a stunning effect in the end. Overall it retains a temperate quality of treatment, common to the of Pre-Renaissance and Bengal School of Art, while abiding by the Mughal school tradition in the treatment of landscape and foliage, adding a further dimension with the introduction of receding perspective in the background. Also worth noticing is the scrupulous attention paid to the anatomical structuring of forms.

Pranay Ranjan Roy, was widely represented in major exhibitions at the Bombay Art Society, Calcutta, Delhi, Lahore and Mysore.