Abanindranath Tagore

Abanindranath Tagore was born in 1871 into the Tagore family of Jorasanko, Calcutta, nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. Trained initially in the European academic style, he turned in the 1890s toward the study of Mughal and Rajput miniature painting technique, working closely with the British art administrator E. B. Havell, then principal of the Calcutta School of Art, to develop a new Indian painting style consciously built on these older Indian sources rather than on European oil-painting method. Central to the style was the wash technique: successive thin, transparent layers of watercolour built up and partly washed away again, producing the soft, luminous, misty quality that became the visual signature of what came to be called the Bengal School.

In 1905 Abanindranath painted Bharat Mata, a small watercolour showing the nation personified as a saffron-robed woman with four arms, holding a book, sheaves of rice, a piece of white cloth, and a mala, styled deliberately in the manner of a Hindu goddess. The image, painted in the middle of the Swadeshi movement against the partition of Bengal, became one of the most widely reproduced and influential images of the nation ever painted in India, and the form it gave to Bharat Mata has been echoed in countless later depictions. Abanindranath went on to train a generation of students — among them Nandalal Bose — at Santiniketan and at the Calcutta art school, establishing the Bengal School as the dominant force in Indian art through the first decades of the twentieth century and shaping, through his students, much of the visual art of the independence era that followed.