M. V. Dhurandhar

Possibly the most popular academic indian artist after Raja Ravi Varma, M. V. Dhurandhar was born in
Kolhapur.
An early interest in drawing led his father to admit him to Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay, where he
received special encouragement from its principal, John Griffiths.
Dhurandhar tasted early success with a gold medal from Bombay Art Society for his oil painting, Have
You Come Laxmi? just as he completed his five-year course in 1895, becoming the first Indian to be
awarded this Indian to be awarded this prestigious medal. He continued to be associated with his alma
mater, joining as a teacher soon upon graduation. At the end of an illustrious teaching career, he
became the school’s first Indian director in 1930.
The Abanindranath Tagore-led revivalist movement had taken hold of Bengal as a reaction to British
academic dominance in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries. Bombay artists, on the other
hand, were doing commissioned works that were academic in their rendering and technique but within
an indigenous context, becoming known as
history painters. Dhurandhar remained the
most significant among them, maintaining
a balance between academic realism and
popular commercial art.