The Poet

At the end of the nineteenth century in India, intellectuals and social reformists from the bourgeoisie in Calcutta (now Kolkata) championed a new cultural movement known as the Bengal Renaissance. A nationalist and reformist project, it led to the establishment of the Bengal School, a philosophy of art making that emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century and counted Abanindranath Tagore among its main proponents. The tenets of the School advocated drawing upon aesthetic principles derived from Sanskrit sources, and the adoption of pictorial conventions borrowed from Pahari and Mughal schools of painting. It reclaimed the romantic past of medieval India and sympathized with pan-Asian Buddhist references. Tutored in part by Okakura Kakuzo and other artists visiting from Japan, Tagore developed a new method that was a fusion of both tempera and Japanese wash techniques, an approach that can be discerned in The Poet.