Few front rank artists in modern India had to struggle their way up as Syed Haider Raza had to do, and yet he has carved out for himself a place in the field of landscape painting in which few could excel or even equal him.

Born in 1922, at Babaria, in the Central Provinces, with an innate aptitude for art, Raza had his early training in the Nagpur School of Art. He was soon attracted to Bombay, which offered him an almost unlimited field and he slowly worked his way up the ladder to fame in Western India. Though he got his art diploma from the J. J. School of Art only recently (1947), he enjoys a reputation out of all proportion that yardstick of merit.

He exhibited his paintings for the first time in Bombay  in 1943 and since then he has had something to offer at every show. His one-man exhibition last year (1949) was a great success. He received several prizes  including a silver medal from the Bombay Art Society in  1948 and a gold medal at the All-India Fine Arts Exhibition held at Nagpur the same year and yet another gold medal at the Calcutta Industrial Exhibition.

Raza justifies his preference for watercolour on the plea that it is cheaper and lends itself to easier outdoor painting. Reasons apart, he has translated his partiality for watercolour into some specimens truly representative of his reactions to the outside world. Depending more on colour as a vehicle of expression, he splashes on paper in a carefree manner and succeeds in producing the correct atmosphere, as well as the innermost feelings of the subjects he paints.

A romantic painter, he selects his subjects from nature but always tries to go beyond it and with an almost poetic penetration he transforms the grey vistas of Bori Bunder or Flora Fountain on a realism of the subjects. He has a habit of painting landscapes on the spot so as to ensure  freshness and spontaneity.

- Manu Thacker & G. Venkatachalam, Present-Day Painters of India, p. 39, Bombay, 1950