Grish Chunder Dutt was active between 1872 and 1947 at 35A Shambhunath Pandit Road. After he learned his craft at St. Xavier College, he soon established himself as the finest silversmith of Calcutta. For his work with village pattern depicting Bengali rural and farming life, and also bamboo and dragon pattern inspired by Chinese Export silver, he received the gold medal at Calcutta Industrial Exhibition in 1906 and the highest award at C.P & Berar Exhibition in Nagpur, in 1908, which came with a cash prize of Rs 200.
His clients included Baron Chelmsford, The Chief Justice Harold Derbyshire, The Earl of Elgin, Baron Casey - The Governor of Bengal, The Prince of Wales and His Highness the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, whose assassination, in 1915, precipitated the First World War. It is well documented that the last customer of Grish's silver was the Governor General of India, Chakravarti Rajagopalachar, in 1947. One letter from Justice Harold called his appreciation for Grish's ‘fine workmanship and artistic skill and promptitude in your execution;’ while one advertisement in a newspaper acknowledges the superb craftsmanship of his sterling silver ‘at a moderate price.’ It is worth noting that the usual purity of Indian silver is .830. However, many of the Anglo-Indian ateliers in Calcutta were using Sterling silver, imported directly from the UK.
We can make an impression of what type of silver these high dignitaries were buying, by looking at the very bowl that was presented to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 27th of March 1893. The bowl has come to the British auction market in 2010, fetching £9.600 at Bonhams, inclusive of premium. We can see how beautifully balanced the scale of figures in rapport with their environment is, with the trees, houses and animals around them. If one applies colour to Grish’s silver, it could become a Barbizon painting as well. And indeed, with its epic aspect of the poetry of Bengal rural life and nature, Grish's ethos and silver reminds us of the distinctive impressionist vision of the rural landscape explored by artists such as Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jules Dupré or Hippolyte Camille Delpy in France, between 1830 and well into 1910s.
There are many similarities between the bowl offered to Franz Ferdinand and our covered bowl on sale, which was made a year later, in 1894. The foliage, the lines of people's faces and animals, the trees and the hills are almost identical. In both of them, the farming scene is exquisitely done with naturalistic scales delineated over the length of figures and objects. This style could be read as a creative and nationalist revolt against the British inspired colonial style of silverwork, often done with smooth lines and minimal decoration, of the type we can see, for example, at Hamilton and Co., the first British silversmith to set up shop in Calcutta, in 1808.
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