Description

Pandurang Dattatray Parasnis (1902-1991) was a Bombay based painter. He was the son of eminent author and historian Rao Bahadur Dattatray Balwant Parasnis. He had an affinity towards history and art from a very young age.

Parasnis was born in Satara and he did his early schooling from the New English School. He enrolled at the J. J School of art Bombay in 1927 where he completed his art education. For a brief period he worked as commercial artist at the Ravi Uday press in Ghatkoper which produced popular chromolithographs of Hindu mythology and historical subjects. He later worked at the filmmaker V.Shantaram’s Rajkamal Kalamandir and painted over 100 murals for the studio.

Parasnis was a quintessential Bombay School painter in style and technique. He was greatly influenced by the works of M V Dhurandar and Raja Ravi Varma. He was a skilled landscape and portrait painter with proficiency in both watercolour and oil mediums. He has painted several portraits of noted personalities like Lokmanya Tilak, Bhau Daji Lad, Subhash Chandra Bose and Senapati Bapat among others. Parasnis regularly sent his artworks for various regional art exhibitions at Delhi, Simla, Nashik, Calcutta, Pune, Mysore and Madras. The Prince of Wales Museum acquired one of his paintings in 1934 titled 'The Fugitive' as part of their permanent collection.

Parasnis was a very private and secretive person due to which he largely remained in obscurity as an artist during the later years of his life. He passed away in 1991 at Dadar, Mumbai at the age of 89.