SH Raza

London, June 1: Indians are now rich enough to buy back some of their artistic treasures, according to an expert at Christie’s, the London auction house which has placed a price between £1.3 million and £1.8 million on a painting by Syed Hyder Raza.

If Saurashtra, the 200cmx200cm acrylic on canvas, achieves its target, it will exceed the previous record of £1,273,250 for La Terre, 1973, another of Raza’s works, set at a Christie’s auction in June 2008.

Well-heeled Indians are flooding London for two auctions on consecutive days — the estate of Francis Newton Souza on June 9, followed by a sale of works by, among others, Raza, M.F. Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Bhupen Khakhar, Subodh Gupta, Ganesh Pyne, and Jamini Roy on June 10.

The latter auction has three other works by Raza, valued at £5,000, £8,000 and £150,000 but is led by Saurashtra whose £1 million plus estimate has not been plucked out of the air.

This reassurance was given by Yamini Mehta, a Mumbai girl who grew up in America but moved over after seven years with Christie’s New York to Christie’s London to be its senior specialist and director of the contemporary Indian art department.

“Raza himself considers Saurashtra to be one of the 10 most important works he has done in his life,” she told The Telegraph.

Jamini Roy’s painting, Sunset over the River Hooghly, which features in the auction

Raza, who is 88, has been invited to attend the auction.

“The artist, though living in France for more than half-a-century, is a revered master in India and the painting is one of his most ambitious works he has ever created as homage to his homeland,” Mehta said.

“Its size, scale, and expressive brushstrokes radiate the brilliant colours of India and has a deeply spiritual subtext. In this one work, the artist has worked through all of the themes of his long and varied career and serves as the shining example of one of the best works in this field to come to auction.”

The value depended on “the size of the painting, the palate, where it fits into the artist’s oeuvre”, Mehta explained.

She also described Jamini Roy’s depiction of sunset over the Hooghly, valued at £5,000 to £7,000, as “a very nice work, very charming. It was bought by an Italian diplomat who met (Roberto) Rosselini, when he was filming in India (and did a bunk with a Bengali housewife, Sonali Das Gupta). So there are stories attached to these paintings”.

Raza’s Saurashtra, painted in 1983, comes from a French collector who acquired it directly from the artist.

Whenever Raza is asked about what inspires him, he comes out with the same answer: “I have never left India. I love my country and I am proud of it.”

On who is likely to spend over a million pounds on acquiring the Raza masterpiece or indeed any of the other works in the auctions, Mehta speculated: “It’s so iconic it could go just about anywhere. We have sent 3,500 catalogues all over the world. It could go to an NRI or someone in India. The purchasing power of Indians has gone up a lot, we have noticed.”

In London, revealed Mehta, “we have Lakshmi Mittal’s wife (Usha) who is on the board of Christie’s holding private events.”