Following his academic training and apprenticeships in London and Paris, Jehangir Sabavala returned to India in 1951. Struggling to develop an artistic vocabulary that reconciled the opposing demands of the Impressionist and Cubist traditions in which he had become proficient, and his Indian environs, Ranjit Hoskote describes this period as a ‘private journey of re-discovery’ for the artist, explaining that “Sabavala employed the 1950s in testing his Cubist education against the patterns of his experience: would it hold, could it be extended and modified?” (R. Hoskote, The Crucible of Painting: The Art of Jehangir Sabavala, Mumbai, 2005, p. 62)

In 1957, Sabavala revisited Europe with his wife Shireen, making stops in England, France, Italy and the Netherlands among other countries. Many of the cities the couple visited were still recovering from the devastation of the Second World War, and their sights helped emphasize some of Sabavala’s artistic concerns: “he is preoccupied by time and mortality, by the paradoxical transience and resilience of beauty, by the inevitability and yet the surprise of the seasonal cycles.” (R. Hoskote, Ibid., 2005, p. 71)

In a series of paintings of waterfowl that were inspired by this European sojourn, Sabavala seems to engage with these concerns in his artistic ‘journey of re-discovery’, as if to freeze time and preserve beauty as a stand against violence and destruction. Drawing from his early still life paintings that often featured magnolias, tulips, lilies, bougainvillea and other eye-catching blooms, the artist surrounds a white swan with a striking bunch of peach and orange cannas in this almost abstract 1957 composition. Experimenting with his distilled versions of Cubism and Japonisme, Sabavala endows this highly stylized painting with subtle lyricism as well as a sense of opulence and drama.

Writing about this formative period of the artist’s career, A.S. Raman concisely summed up the virtuosic balance between the West and India, academic discipline and individual freedom, and artistic ‘authenticity’ and tradition that such works represent. “Among the few serious, solitary Indian painters, Jehangir Sabavala has an honoured place […] Sabavala infuses a lyrical and exotic flavour into his canvases which are authentic without being patently traditional. His manner of building up his compositions plane by plane and the subtle harmonies of his palette bear testimony to virtuosity and sensitivity of a high order.” (A.S. Raman, ‘The Art of Jehangir Sabavala’, The Illustrated Weekly of India, 23 November, 1958)