The Portrait Of A Collector

Lina Vincent Sunish

In a country with a rich legacy of materialand built heritage, but a relatively smallnumber of museums to house the arte factsor conserve them in-situ, a few individuals are investing personal time and resources for the love of art and history. Anil Relia in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, is one of them. Painstakingly and with dedication, he has gathered an admirable collection of Indian portraiture, the only one of its kind in India. Lina Vincent Sunish interviews him.

LVS: What sparked your interest in Portraits? When did you begin collecting them and what is the extant of your Collection currently?

AR: For me a portrait is not just a painting or a picture of a person, it is a journey back in time through the eyes of the artist. A portrait speaks a lot about the person, their life and taste, society, lifestyle, etc.

Even before I knew what the term ‘collecting’ meant I had been in some ways collecting art. As a child, fascinated by colours and prints, in Surat, I would gather the labels pasted on cloth bundles arriving in warehouses near my residence. Carefully peeling off the labels, I would clean and preserve them in schoolbooks. These labels, which I later understood were lithographs, carried images of merchants’ ancestors and stood as symbols of a family’s business legacy and credibility. This inquisitiveness and wonder as a child developed over time into a passion for portraits.