Sobha Singh was born at Sri Hargobindpur in Gurdaspur district in 1901, worked as a draughtsman in the army, and settled at Andretta in the Kangra valley in 1949.
His portraits of Guru Nanak Dev Ji and Guru Gobind Singh Ji are the images reproduced in gurdwaras, calendars, shops and houses across the world. When a Punjabi imagines the Gurus, the face is his.
He also painted the Punjabi qissa subjects, Sohni Mahiwal above all, and those images are equally standard.
There is a serious argument about this. Sikh doctrine does not describe the Gurus' appearance and no contemporary likeness exists. A twentieth-century painter's imagination has become the fixed visual image of figures the tradition deliberately did not depict.
That argument is worth having and it does not change the fact that his work is the most widely reproduced Punjabi art of any period.
His house at Andretta is a museum.
He worked from live models and from his own family for the faces, and the method is described in his own account. What is reproduced now as a devotional image began as a studio portrait of somebody he knew.
He also painted Sohni Mahiwal and Heer Ranjha, and his studio at Andretta in the Kangra valley is now a small museum and gallery run by his family.
The images he made are taken by many people for portraits. They are inventions of the middle of the twentieth century by a man working from imagination and from earlier prints.