Abanindranath Tagore

Abanindranath Tagore was born in 1871 into the Tagore household at Jorasanko in Calcutta. The poet Rabindranath was his uncle and the painter Gaganendranath his elder brother. He learned pastel and oil from European teachers at the Calcutta School of Art, then spent much of his life unlearning them.

Working with E. B. Havell, he argued that Indian painters should look to Mughal and Rajput pictures, and later to the Ajanta murals, rather than to the academies of London. His early Krishna pictures borrow from Mughal miniatures. Over time he took in Chinese and Japanese brushwork too, helped by friendships with Okakura Kakuzō and Yokoyama Taikan. In 1907 the brothers set up the Indian Society of Oriental Art.

Bharat Mata, a watercolour of 1905 first called Banga Mata, became the best-known image of the Swadeshi years and now hangs in the Victoria Memorial Hall. K. G. Subramanyan and R. Siva Kumar have long argued that his real measure lies in the work of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The Arabian Nights series of 1930 uses the old tales to look at colonial Calcutta.

His pupils included Nandalal Bose, Asit Kumar Haldar and K. Venkatappa, so his ideas travelled to Santiniketan and well beyond. He also wrote children’s books still read in Bengali, among them Khirer Putul and Buro Angla.

After his death in 1951 his eldest son, Alokendranath, gave almost all the family’s paintings by him to the Rabindra Bharati Society. Most have stayed in storage since.