Celebrating a great pioneer painter
SM Sultan did not bother his head much with either grammar or discipline and made faces of men and women along with nature, blending imagination with nature. He was a confirmed bachelor who could be described as a roving mystic. He settled down in an abandoned building in a quiet corner of Narail, where he lived with an adopted family and pets of his own including dogs, mongoose and monkeys. In 1952, a critique, Syed Amjad Ali described him as being mostly a landscape painter of Bengal and Kashmir who had "severe selectiveness of lines of human figures, the largeness and boldness of composition and above all the human interest and tragic not that welcomes his maturity. The bulging knotting muscles of his farmers and boatmen recalls the works of Pieter Breugel and Vincent Van Gogh. The central theme in his painting was "man in relationship with soil and water"
For long SM Sultan had experimented with native vegetable and earth colours, doing his paintings with own hands rather than with a brush or a palette, fixing the paints on the background with local resin. It was natural that under the circumstances, the weather would have a harsh impact on the preservation of his works, even though any of his works today sell for an astronomical price.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. SM Sultan won the "Ekushey Padak" in 1982; he was given the special honour of being the "Resident Artist" since 1984; Bangladesh Charu Shilpi Sangsad award in 1986 as well as the "Independence Award" in 1993. He established the Fine Art Institute at Narail in 1969 and another institute "Charupeet " at Jessore in 1973. His last days were spent as a free-lance artist at Narial.
He died on 10 October 1994.