Important Notice

Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury was born in 1899 in Rangpur, part of present day Bangladesh. He studied art at first at the Khelat Chandra Institute in Calcutta and then under the tutelage of master painter Abanindranath Tagore and finally learnt the nuances of drawing and portraiture under the foreign artist Signor Boiess.

Chowdhury was a legend in his lifetime as much for his prowess in hunting and wrestling as for his talent as a... Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury was born in 1899 in Rangpur, part of present day Bangladesh. He studied art at first at the Khelat Chandra Institute in Calcutta and then under the tutelage of master painter Abanindranath Tagore and finally learnt the nuances of drawing and portraiture under the foreign artist Signor Boiess.

Chowdhury was a legend in his lifetime as much for his prowess in hunting and wrestling as for his talent as a painter and sculptor. At a time when the Indian independence movement was in its infancy, with new ideas and attitudes of liberty and freedom spreading all over the subcontinent, Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury was appointed the first Indian principal of the Government College of Arts and Crafts in Chennai (then know as the Government School of Industrial Arts). He was only 30 at the time, but this multifaceted individual was already on his way to becoming a legend and one of the best-known Indian artists of the 1940s and 50s or the independence struggle period. And what an atmosphere that was to create art in! Looking at Chowdhury’s works, both paintings and sculptures, one cannot miss observing the mark that the birth of a new nation left on this artist. In fact he called this the "most fruitful period of my life as a painter and sculptor" and it was at this time that he created his most famous pieces "The Triumph of Labour" and "Mahatma Gandhi", both sculptures that grace the beautiful Marina Beach in Chennai. In the creation of the former piece the artist admits to having drawn inspiration from Joe Rosenthal’s famous picture of the American troops raising their country’s flag at Iwo Jima during the Second World War. The second sculpture portrays Gandhi in the march to Dandi stance, which will forever be remembered and has been reproduced many times all over the world.

During his tenure as principal at the college, Chowdhury attracted talent from all over the country and the school became virtually a national institution, producing some of India's best-known artists in the years that followed. When Chowdhury retired, he was followed in the post by another dedicated colleague, Dr K. C. S. Panicker, who gradually steered the college to the modernism of the later half of the 20th Century.

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