A Human Face
A face that seems to come out of the dark.
- Artist
- Rabindranath Tagore
- Date
- Undated (Tagore painted from his sixties until his death in 1941)
- Medium
- Watercolour on paper
- Where it is
- Indian Museum, Kolkata
- Kind
- Bengal School
A long face looks straight out, eyes heavy, mouth closed. It is made of loose, searching lines and thin washes of grey, green and yellow, so that the features seem to surface out of the paper rather than sit on it. The shoulders dissolve into scribble.
In 1900, nearly forty, Tagore wrote to Jagadish Chandra Bose that he was drawing in a sketchbook and that the pictures were not meant for any salon in Paris. He took up drawing and painting in earnest at sixty. In 1930 the pictures were shown in Paris after all.
In 1937 the Nazi regime moved five of his paintings out of a Berlin museum, and they were later listed as degenerate art. This sheet is in the Indian Museum, Kolkata.
