From the Brush of the Bard

On the 156th birth anniversary of poet, author, composer and thinker Rabindranath Tagore we explore the painter that he was, and the women he chose to paint in his artworks

HYDERABAD: Tagore was self-taught in art. He began with doodling that had a symmetrical pattern. The underlying lines and dots are in sync with one another especially in the portraits of the women he painted. The female figure in the painting ‘Portrait of the Woman’ has a mysterious look in her eyes, which is deepened by the dark cloud-like veil surrounding her face. The face is said to be of Kadmbari Devi, his playmate, his elder brother Jyotirindranath Tagore’s child-bride; she was of the same age as Tagore and they almost grew up together.

The woman appears again and again in different forms in the poet’s writings and artworks. She ended her life four months after Tagore married Mrinalini Devi. It’s she for whom Tagore composed the literary piece ‘First Sorrow’. The description of the woman with a veil is exactly what he
painted. The shadows of the lady fall in his paintings where he draws dark figures wrapped in gloom. Even the connecting dots seem to ooze an unbearable sadness that only an artist-poet the stature of Tagore can carry.

Some of his other paintings explore the secret world of women as they converse with their eyes or lift their arms to reveal what otherwise remains hidden in his writings. The female figures surreptitiously crept inside his paintings make the line between the two forms of art blur and pervade into realms that are otherwise born from the amalgamation of the unusual and exceptional. Tagore taught himself to draw and paint, and it was not until 1942 that he learnt brush-and-wash technique when he travelled to Japan and China. The poet began painting during his twilight years at the ripe, old age of 63.

He was self-taught that’s why we don’t see major influences on his paintings and it is extremely difficult to copy and reproduce his artworks as the works don’t have the grammar the trained artists have. That’s how there was a ruckus when some fake paintings of the bard were copied and presented in a reputed college of Calcutta a few years ago. The poet himself called the narratives in colour as ‘his affair in the
twilight zone of his life’. And till today the originality of his art speak of his individuality that didn’t need an ism to define his style – it was a shore between abstract and surrealism, perfect in its own way.