Rare Gandhi portrait to go under hammer in London

AN OIL painting of Mahatma Gandhi created during his 1931 visit to the UK will be sold at auction in London next month.

Painted by British artist Clare Leighton, the portrait is being described by auction house Bonhams as "thought to be the only oil portrait that Gandhi actually sat for", reported the BBC.

Leighton created the work when Gandhi came to London for the second Round Table conference, which aimed to discuss constitutional reforms and India's demands for self-governance.

The painting will go under the hammer in the second week of July at Bonhams auction house.

"This is a painting of unique historic and cultural significance. It would be great if it could be seen and appreciated more widely, whether in India or elsewhere," said Caspar Leighton, the artist's great nephew.

According to Bonhams, Leighton "was one of the very few artists admitted to his office and was given the opportunity to sit with on multiple occasions to sketch and paint his likeness".

Report said that Leighton gained access to Gandhi through her partner Henry Noel Brailsford, a British political journalist who strongly supported India's independence movement.

In November 1931, Leighton displayed her Gandhi portraits at an exhibition at the Albany Galleries in London. Though Gandhi did not attend the opening, several Indian delegation representatives from the Round Table conference were present, including prominent independence leader Sarojini Naidu.

The exhibition featured both the oil portrait now being auctioned and a charcoal sketch of Gandhi sleeping in his office.

British journalist Winifred Holtby wrote about the painting: "The little man squats bare-headed, in his blanket, one finger raised, as it often is to emphasise a point, his mouth parted for a word that is almost a smile".

Gandhi's personal secretary Mahadev Desai later wrote to Leighton, saying: "many of my friends who saw it [the oil portrait] in the Albany Gallery said to me that it was a good likeness".

According to the BBC, the portrait remained in Leighton's collection until her death in 1989 in the US, when it passed to her family.

After the 1931 London exhibition, there is no public record of the oil portrait being displayed again until 1978, when the Boston Public Library organised an exhibition of Leighton's works.

However, the artist's family believes the portrait was shown in the US during the 1970s, where it was allegedly damaged in a knife attack carried out by a right-wing Hindu activist. A label on the painting's backing shows it was restored by the Lyman Allyn Museum Conservation Laboratory in Connecticut in 1974.