작품 상세

Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938), Untitled (Three ladies), watercolour on card, signed in black to lower left G.T., mounted, 28 x 19.9cm. Provenance Bought from a private collection by the present owner. These artworks come from the descendants of the Maharaja of Santosh, a former princely state in what is now Bangladesh. The family has connection with R. Tagore as the owner's great uncle (Sri Promothonath Ray Chowdhury) was an eminent Bengali writer. The owner’s grandfather was knighted in 1930 and bestowed the title of Maharaja in 1936 and The Times reported his death in 1939. He became the first elected president of the Bengal Legislative Council. The owner’s father too, Maharajkumar Robin Roy had actively encouraged and promoted Bengal artists in his life time and he had collected works by these artists among others whose works subsequently were highly sought after by the international art collectors. Gaganendranath Tagore was an Indian painter of the Bengal school. Along with his brother Abanindranath Tagore, they founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art. he was counted as one of the earliest modern artists in India. Gaganendranath was a uncle of the poet Rabindranath Tagore and had contributed his illustrations for his uncle's autobiography Jeevansmriti (1912).In the early 1920s, Gaganendranath pioneered experiments in modernist painting and has been referred to as the only Indian painter before the 1940s who made use of the language and syntax of Cubism in his work. The two Tagore paintings offered have been referred to as cubist which shared the fascination for the theatre space-defining characteristic of interpenetratig the receding and protruding planes and also lighting in such a way that they established a relationship between light and space. In here too, shadows were preferred and beams of light were thrown from various angles focusing on the principle characters.