Dated and distanced in time, quality, and category of work, late Mirza Sajjad Hussain's exhibition of portraits shown recently at the Karachi Art Council's AR Faridi Gallery stirs interest when accessed for the sense of history it manifests.

Born in 1893, Hussain commenced his art education at the Lucknow School of Art from where he acquired a Diploma in1916. For the next three decades he was art instructor at the Training College Muslim University Aligarh.

Born and bred in the colonial era, Hussain was a product of the aesthetic environment created by the British Raj. As per their colonial policy, a conscious introduction of European academic realism through Company Artists, and later through art schools in major colonial cities of the subcontinent had begun to transform Indian art practices. A curriculum modelled on the School of Industrial Arts at South Kensington was devised for all these schools. Among the popular subjects Portrait painting was the most subscribed course.

With the decline of traditional art Indian rulers as well as the Indian elite turned to collecting western art and sitting for portraits by artists. This too contributed to the development of portraiture as a genre in its own right. Artists adopted western styles, ideas of composition, perspective and realism to illustrate Indian subjects. Now, in contrast to the earlier humble position of court artists, the colonial artists enjoyed the elevated status of independent gentlemen and painting of formal portraiture was prized and valued for its affinity to Victorian salon art.

While a few painters gained notoriety as portraitists as well as royalty and history painters, a large number of them were unfortunately just stereotyping or exoticising their subjects. With the passage of time, when the desire for indigenous ideology and nationalist aspirations became dominant, art in the subcontinent fragmented into several strains.

During the early independence years, other than Mughal and Rajput miniature tradition and the Oriental Watercolour technique of transparent washes, the 'Western' mannerism consisting of landscapes, genre motifs and portraits in oil, executed in classical European style, was also still prevalent. Thus a considerable amount of 'contemporary' painting visible in Pakistan during the immediate post-partition years had already come into effect, decades before nationhood became a reality. An audience already familiar with this art continued to support it till radical departures ushered in the bold and the new.

When, at the behest of Dr Mehmood Husssain, Sajjad Hussain arrived in Pakistan to join the faculty of Jamia Millia in the late '50s, he was already an accomplished artist who had established his credentials at Aligarh. Once here, he did not have any difficulty in earning the respect of his colleagues at the Jamia Millia. Rather than join the avant garde mainstream art that was evolving in fits and starts in a new born state, he continued to teach and train students at Jamia Millia. The work currently on display is the collection he has left behind, mainly painted for the university library, which is no longer functional.

An assortment of flattering likenesses of heads of states, poets, philosophers, thinkers and sages, these works are unevenly divided into some very well painted portraits and others, where attention has lapsed considerably. Images of Field Marshall Ayub Khan, Sir Arthur Lothian, Rabindernath Tagore, Akbar Allahbadi, Mirza Ghalib, Homer and a Kashmiri lady are sensitively rendered with particular attention to tonal variations and textural nuances regarding treatment of beard, hair and skin pigmentation.

The artist concentrated mainly on the 'face', with particular consideration given to capturing the personality of the subject but on closer inspection one discovers that the same concern is not accorded to the rest of the painting. Scant attention is paid to anatomical correctness and folds and forms of drapery, from the neck down, and there is an indiscriminate use of cast shadows while the perspective is awry in some works.

It would have been wiser to just display the artists well painted works only. A selection, trimmed down to only his best paintings, will be more representative of his stature.

 
Such collections, in the absence of a museum of art, should be housed in suitable venues where successive generations can view them and accrue new meanings from them.