B.N. Goswamy was an India art historian and critic, known for his scholarly work on Indian miniature paintings, particularly the Pahari Painting. BN Goswamy passed away in Chandigarh aged 90. He was an indomitable force, and we are assured his shoes would be hard to fill.
BN Goswamy was born in Sargodha, present-day Pakistan, to a Bengali family. They moved to Amritsar, Punjab following the 1947 partition.
He graduated from Punjab University in 1954 and was appointed as an IAS officer in 1956. He quit his service after two years and enrolled in a PhD programme at Punjab University to study art and art history. He researched on the evolution of the Kangra painting.
He received the Padma Shri Award (1998) and the Padma Bhushan Award (2008) from the Government of India for his contributions to Indian arts and literature.
His writing has a soft, fluid, and poetic language, capturing a diverse range of subjects - textiles, photography, architecture, old documents, cartography, paper history, the art market, dreams, omens, carpets, shawls, jewellery, masks, poets, and eminent artists.
He stressed the significance of family and lineage in the creation and continuance of miniature painting. Goswami collated information through investigative work, intuition, and connoisseurship. He studied the paintings in southern India, observing the common aesthetic style.
Goswamy blended the eye of an aesthete, the discriminating of a connoisseur, and the spirit of a poet, with the disciplined mind of a scholar and the graceful writing of an accomplished writer. Prof BN Goswamy is undoubtedly one of the biggest loss suffered by the art industry. We pay our condolences to the legend, who still moves us.