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The J.J. School of Art was founded in
1857
and was proudly modelled on the
Royal Academy School in London. It was named after Sir Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy,
a businessman and philanthropist, who donated funds for its endowment.
While under colonial rule, the majority of the teachers at the school were
expats who taught along strict academic lines with no desire to explore
the avant-garde movements in Europe at the time. They sought to create
vocational artists for the purpose of the Empire, artists who would reproduce
nature and the environment as faithfully as possible. As they described “
our
native students have much subtlety of the eye and finger and will probably make
excellent copyists, engravers and mechanical draughtsmen. Perspective seems to
puzzle them.
”
7
Painting from the nude was only permitted in the diploma class
as at the school ‘
nudity, particularly female, was wrapped up in sin and Victorian
inhibition
’. Instead, Newton was taught such things as the fundamentals of
anatomy from an M.D at J.J Hospital. Newton described a college trip in
1940
that reflected the restrictive nature of the school’s teachings at the time:
“
Mr Sirgaonkar took the class to Trombay. He was the art master of the
elementary and intermediate classes at the JJ school of Art, Bombay. It was
1940
and I was
16
years old and learning to paint from scratch in the elementary class.
We had to do geometrical designs, draw still lifes of arranged objects with graded
pencils ranging from HB to
6
B, do memory drawing, lettering and paint and
trees and flowers in watercolours straight from the plants which the gardener
would cut from the campus garden and place in bottles on our desks.
The trip to Trombay was a rare treat. Mr Sirgaonkar did not have much
opportunity in class to show us what he could do, how he himself painted. In class
he merely supervised our work. But at Trombay he unravelled a mat and opened
his watercolour kit. He pinned a sheet of drawing paper to the board, and asked
one of us to fetch some water in a jar from a watering hole nearby. The array of
watercolour cakes of pigment gleamed in the sun.
Mr Sirgaonkar dipped a fat sable brush in water and worked it on to a cake of
chrome yellow until the brush was loaded with the colour. He then held the board
almost vertically and spread the yellow over the paper more or less evenly. I will
never forget his remark. He said “I paint the whole paper with a yellow wash
first, to indicate a sunny day?” He then mixed in greens and browns, painting the
nearby trees and bushes, and the same houses in the distance. The painting was in
confluent colours, with colours merging with each other. The effect was that of
19
th
Century British watercolours.
”
8
Unwilling to be confined in this manner, Newton continued his rebellion
against authority, establishment and convention. It was not long before people
outside of the J.J. School of Art started noticing Newton for the wrong
reasons, as J. Mohan writes
“
he was not only brilliantly talented with the pencil and charcoal but “he had the
gift of the gab - he loaded his talk, always spoken in a low voice, with punches
and expletives. What is more he could write as well as he could paint. Pen and
paintbrush were one and the same for him – to be used as a barbed lance not at
windmills but as his enemies.
”
9
ART SCHOOL
1940—1945
Newton, aged
17
,
1941
© The Estate of Francis Newton Souza
He was not only brilliantly talented with
the pencil and charcoal but he had the gift of
the gab - he loaded his talk, always spoken
in a low voice, with punches and expletives.
—
J. Mohan