He and his student, Saya Saung, are largely responsible for creating the foundations and identity of a Western-style painting circle within the Mandalay School.
[4] Ba Zaw was born to a well-known silversmith by the name of U Kyin who was awarded a gold medal by a British viceroy of Burma.
[1][2] Ba Zaw's health was frail, and he subsequently fell ill, quit his university studies, and took a job as an art instructor at St. Paul's High School in Rangoon.
The BAC was informally organized in 1913 as a venue where amateur British colonial painters in Burma might meet and exchange skills, and became more officially established in 1918.
He won scholarships or painting competitions when he was a youngster[1][2][6] before he encountered Ba Ohn, Saya Chone or British painters.
She states that Ba Zaw was very good at painting Traditional Burmese arabesque,[6] one of the skills which Min Naing claims he learned from Saya Chone.
[2][5] In Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History, Ranard claims that Ba Zaw's "strict canon" regarding color likely derived from British sources, directly or obliquely, through exposure to the work of J. J. Hilder (see below), from his British teachers at the Burma Art Club, or in England where Ba Zaw studied at the Royal College of Art in the late 1920s.
G. Hla Maung, Nyan Shein, and Amar all state or suggest that Ba Zaw first discovered Hilder's work, while Ko Ko Naing is the single detractor, claiming that Saya Saung became a student of Ba Zaw after Saya Saung started using Hilder's paintings for learning exercises.
He also draws parallels between the tragic history of both artists, their high-strung temperaments, their lives marked by “asthenia”, and their “aesthetic austerity” (which may have drawn them to the purity of watercolor transparency, unmixed with white).
Ba Nyan wanted to graduate to oil painting quickly, but realized it would take years for this to occur at the college.
While on a trip to England, Ward managed to have Ba Nyan transferred to the Yellow Door School, the private academy of London artist Frank Spenlove-Spenlove (1867–1933).
[8] Ba Zaw graduated easily from the school in three years with an ARCA (Associate of the Royal College of Art), apparently not studying oil painting there.
Thus, the two painters began to divide the Burmese art community into camps, one following the new styles that Ba Nyan was introducing and the other stubbornly sticking to the transparent watercolor techniques that had been introduced at the Burma Art Club at least a decade earlier and remained the domain of Ba Zaw.
Three of the works are watercolors on permanent display in the collection of the National Museum of Myanmar, one of which appears in Ranard's Burmese Painting: A Linear and Lateral History.
[15] It is a watercolor landscape bearing the orange, brown and yellowish tones that one might expect of a painter influenced by J. J. Hilder.
[17] The pencil sketch is a dark work of dense mass—a landscape with a single isolated figure—that is apparently a funeral scene and clearly shows emotive skills.
The monochrome watercolor is a portrait of the famous Burmese general Maha Bandula, who died in the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–1826, sitting proudly astride a horse.
Ba Zaw also made a large impact in Burma in the art of cartoon, his works appearing in Thuriya magazine.
Martin Jones, who was one of the early British members of the BAC, is said to have been the first painter in Burma to draw and publish cartoons in Burmese publications.
Amar claims that Ba Zaw's work sold in large numbers to colonials in Burma, but oddly none of these paintings (unlike those of Saya Saung) have appeared in the hands of UK auctioneers or dealers in recent years.
[1][2] Nyan Shein offers a sad picture of him in his last years, visiting artists, clutching a book by J. J. Hilder in his hands.