Zainul Abedin (1914-1976) was born in Mymensingh in 1914.

He is an artist of exceptional talent and international repute. He played a pioneering role in the modern art movement in Bangladesh that began, by all accounts, with the setting up of the Government Institute of Arts and Crafts (now Institute of Fine Arts) in 1948 in Dhaka of which he was the founding principal.

He got himself admitted in Calcutta Government Art School in 1933 and learnt for five years the British/European academic style that the school diligently followed. In 1938, he joined the faculty of the Art School, and continued to paint in his laid-back, romantic style. A series of watercolours that Zainul did as his tribute to the river Brahmaputra earned him the Governor's Gold Medal in an all-India exhibition in 1938. It was a recognition that brought him into the limelight, and gave him the confidence to forge a style of his own.

In 1943, he drew a series of sketches on the man-made famine that had spread throughout Bengal, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Done in Chinese ink and brush on cheap packing paper, the series, known as Famine Sketches were haunting images of cruelty and depravity of the merchants of death, and the utter helplessness of the victims. The Rebel Crow (watercolour, 1951) marks a high point of that style. This particular brand of realism that combined social inquiry and protest with higher aesthetics was to prove useful to him in different moments of history such as 1969 and 1971 when Zainul executed a few of his masterpieces.

In 1947, after the partition of the subcontinent, Zainul came to settle in Dhaka, the capital of the eastern province of Pakistan. Dhaka had no art institute or any artistic activity worth mentioning. Zainul Abedin, with the help of his colleagues, many of whom had also migrated to Dhaka from Calcutta, founded the art Institute. In 1951, he went to Slade School of Art in London for a two-year training.

In 1975, Zainul Abedin set up a folk museum at sonargaon, and a gallery in Mymensingh (Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin Museum) to house some of his works. He became actively involved in a movement to preserve the heritage of Bengal, and reorient Bengal art to the roots of Bengali culture, as he felt the futility of unimaginative copying of western techniques and styles that modern art somehow inspired in a section of the local artists. Two Women (gouache 1953), Painna's Mother (gouache 1953) and Woman (watercolour 1953) are some of his notable works.

His health began to deteriorate however, as he developed lung cancer. He died on 28 May 1976 in Dhaka.