Luminous serenity

Born in Gujarat, western India, in 1951, Shanti Panchal studied art in Bombay before coming to London on a British Council scholarship in 1978. He has made his home in this country ever since, with regular trips back to India, and enjoys a justly high reputation for the distinctive large-scale watercolours he specialises in. However, he produces only a few paintings a year (a large picture may take six to 12 months to complete), and has no commercial dealer to represent his work, so it is hard to see it unless on view in a museum. Panchal has been fortunate in official honours — winning the BP Portrait Award at the National Portrait Gallery in 1991, being appointed artist-in-residence at the British Museum and the Harris Museum, Preston, in 1994, and benefiting from various commissions in painting and stained glass — and has enjoyed solo shows in recent years at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford (1993), Angel Row Gallery in Nottingham (1998) and Pitshanger Manor, London (2000). Now Chelmsford Museum has taken the initiative, and is showing a representative selection of Panchal’s remarkable paintings.

Although restricted in terms of exhibition space (though this is set to change with current plans for expansion), Chelmsford Museum has a solid standing among those who care about modern British painting. This is based more on the permanent collection than the exhibition programme, for among the treasures at Chelmsford (though not currently on the walls) are fine paintings by John Aldridge, Douglas Percy Bliss, Peter Coker and Cedric Morris. When I visited, there were a handful of works on show by the local boy Lynton Lamb (1907–77), best-known as an illustrator, but an interesting painter in oils as well. It would have been instructive to see the Shanti Panchal show hung beside a substantial selection of Chelmsford’s permanent collection of paintings, but resources currently preclude this.