Take a trip down memory lane. An exhibition of priceless portraits of luminaries—belonging to the 1930s and ‘40s—by artists like K K Hebber, N S Bendre, Jamini Roy, A M Dhurandhar and Walter Langhammer is opening at the Museum Gallery, Kala Ghoda, on Tuesday. The heirs of this exquisite collection Varsha and Dinesh Thacker, the main forces behind the-not-for-sale-exhibition, will ensure that the portraits are available for public viewing till February 8.

“This collection has been made over the years and was handed down from my grandfather’s time,” says the unpretentious and dressed-down Thacker, as he supervises the mounting of the show. The intention is not to sell the works, which were collected mostly by his father Madhu M Thacker, but to share them with the people of Mumbai. The portraits are done mostly in the realistic mode, and are a slice of history that even the layperson can enjoy. Luminaries like the filmmaker Baburao Painter (1890-1954) and Jyoti Savitri Bai Phule, an educationist and Dalit women’s activist, have been rendered in the watercolour technique that was handed down to Indian painters of the Bombay School by British painters who taught at the J J School of Art. The personalities featured in exhibition mostly belong to the pre-Independence era and played a singificant role in the island city’s life.

“The art portraiture began in India as far back as the Vishnudharmottara, a Purana text dedicated to the arts dated to the 7th century AD. Then it was the Mughals who popularised courtly portraits, especially in the court of Akbar. However, it was the British who taught Indians realistic portraiture and this exhibition is a vast documentation of that,” says Shridhar Andhare, a free-lance evaluator of art objects and musicologist, who worked for 30 years with the Prince of Wales Museum (now the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya).

With the advent of cameras, this style of painting became obsolete and painters like M F Husain and A H Ara (whose early portraits are also part of this show) moved on to Modernism which, to be honest, is difficult for the common man to access. “Over the years, painting has become the exclusive purview of the elite and the intelligentsia.

I do think that it is important to also show works like these that even the common man has access to,” says Andhare.