Syed Abdullah Shah Qadri, popularly known as Bulleh Shah, was a Mughal-era Punjabi Islamic philosopher and Sufi poet. His first spiritual teacher was Shah Inayat Qadiri, a Sufi murshid of Lahore.
Maqbool Fida Husain was a modern Indian painter of international acclaim, and a founding member of Bombay Progressive Artists' Group.
Tyeb Mehta was an Indian painter, sculptor and film maker. He was part of the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group and the first post-colonial generation of artists in India, like John Wilkins who also broke free from the nationalist Bengal school and embraced Modernism instead, with its post-impressionist colours, cubist forms and brusque, expressionistic styles.
Dara Singh Randhawa, known professionally as Dara Singh, was an Indian professional wrestler, actor and politician. He started acting in 1952 and was the first sportsman to be nominated to the Rajya Sabha of India. He worked as Hindi and Punjabi film producer, director and writer, and he acted in films and television. He is known for his role of Hanuman in film Bajrangi (1976) and in Ramanand Sagar's Ramayan.
Mughal painting is that particular style of South Asian painting which generally confines miniatures either as book illustrations or as single works to be kept in albums, which emerged from Persian miniature painting, with Indian Muslim, Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist influences, and developed largely in the court of the Mughal Empire of the 16th to 18th centuries. The Mughal emperors were Muslims and they are credited to have consolidated Islam in South Asia, and spread Muslim arts and culture as well as the faith.
Indian painting has a very long tradition and history in Indian art. The earliest Indian paintings were the rock paintings of pre-historic times, the petroglyphs as found in places like Bhimbetka rock shelters, some of the Stone Age rock paintings found among the Bhimbetka rock shelters are approximately 30,000 years old. India's Buddhist literature is replete with examples of texts which describe palaces of the army and the aristocratic class embellished with paintings, but the paintings of the Ajanta Caves are the most significant of the few survivals. Smaller scale painting in manuscripts was probably also practised in this period, though the earliest survivals are from the medieval period. Mughal painting represented a fusion of the Persian miniature with older Indian traditions, and from the 17th century its style was diffused across Indian princely courts of all religions, each developing a local style. Company paintings were made for British clients under the British raj, which from the 19th century also introduced art schools along Western lines, leading to modern Indian painting, which is increasingly returning to its Indian roots.
Michael Dahl (1659–1743) was a Swedish portrait painter who lived and worked in England most of his career and died there. He was one of the most internationally known Swedish painters of his time. He painted portraits of many aristocrats and some members of royal families, such as Queen Anne of Great Britain, Prince George of Denmark and the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden.
Amrita Sher-Gil was an eminent Hungarian-Indian painter. She has been called "one of the greatest avant-garde women artists of the early 20th century" and a "pioneer" in modern Indian art. Drawn towards painting since a young age, Sher-Gil started getting formal lessons in the art, at the age of eight. She first gained recognition at the age of 19, for her oil painting titled Young Girls (1932).
Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1894–1975) was a painter artist and intellectual from Pakistan, who created his own unique, distinctive painting style influenced by Mughal art, miniature painting, Art Nouveau and Islamic art traditions. He is considered 'the first significant modern Muslim artist from South Asia', and the national artist of Pakistan. He was given the title of Khan Bahadur by the British Empire in India in 1934, awarded Pakistan's Hilal-i-Imtiaz in 1960, and the Presidential medal for Pride of Performance in 1958.
Akbar Padamsee is a contemporary Indian artist and painter, considered one of the pioneers in Modern Indian painting along with Raza, Souza and M.F. Hussain. Over the years he has also worked with various mediums from oil painting, plastic emulsion, water colour, sculpture, printmaking, to computer graphics, and photography, as worked a film maker, sculptor, photographer, engraver, and lithographer. Today his paintings are among the most valued by modern Indian artists. His painting Reclining Nude was sold for US$1,426,500 at Sotheby's in New York on 25 March 2011.
Sohan Qadri was a yogi, poet and a painter from India who lived in Copenhagen for 30 years. During his life, Qadri interacted with a number of well-known cultural figures including Surrealist painter René Magritte, Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, and architect Le Corbusier. His paintings result from states of deep meditation, and are influenced by the colors of India: luminous, dye-infused works on serrated paper. He had more than 70 exhibitions in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Cholamandal Artists' Village, established in 1966, is the largest artists' commune in India. Its artists are credited for the Madras Movement of Art (1950s–1980s), which brought modernism to art in South India. Their work is widely recognized as some of the best art produced in postwar India and is shown regularly in galleries across the country. Several Cholamandal artists have also shown in Europe, the United States and South America.
Bhabesh Chandra Sanyal commonly known as B. C. Sanyal, the doyen of modernism in Indian art, was an Indian painter and sculptor and an Art teacher to three generations of artists. During his lifetime he not just saw the partition of the Indian subcontinent three times, 1905, 1947 and 1971, but also witnessed 20th century Indian art in all its phases. His notable paintings include The flying scarecrow, Cow herd, Despair and Way to peace, which depicts Mahatma Gandhi with a Hindu and a Muslim child.
Devi Prasad was an Indian artist and peace activist. He was a pioneering studio potter, painter, designer, photographer, art educator and peace activist.
Pakhal Tirumal Reddy (1915–1996) known as P T Reddy was an Indian artist. Born to Ram Reddy and Ramanamma as a fifth child on 4 January 1915 at Annaram village, Karimnagar district, Telangana, India. He got his diploma in painting from J. J. School of Art, Bombay (1939). He married Yashoda Reddy on 9 May 1947, with the help of P. T. Reddy, she went ahead with her studies and completed M. A. and Ph.D. and she authored over 22 compilations and novels.
Sidharth Malhotra is an Indian actor who appears in Hindi films. Malhotra began a career as a model at the age of 18. Dissatisfied by the profession, he went on to work as an assistant director to Karan Johar in the 2010 film My Name Is Khan. He made his acting debut with a leading role in Johar's teen drama Student of the Year (2012), for which he received a Filmfare Award for Best Male Debut nomination.
Andretta is a village and an artists' colony in Himachal Pradesh. The artists' colony was established in the 1920s, when Irish theatre artiste and environmentalist, Norah Richards, shifted here from Lahore. Near Palampur in the Kangra District, with Dhauladhar range of the Himalayas as a backdrop, Andretta over the years has attracted many noted artists, theatre practitioners, painters and more recently potters. Two of the people who became associated with it early on were painters Sobha Singh and B. C. Sanyal.
The Önningeby artists colony was founded in 1886 by Victor Westerholm, a Finnish landscape painter, who had a summer house in the village of Önningeby on the Åland Islands in the Baltic Sea. It attracted Finnish and Swedish artists who gathered in the summer to paint landscapes en plein air rather than in their studios. Many of the participating artists were women.
