Nandalal Bose (1882-1966) was hailed in colonial India as the most celebrated student of Abanindranath, a nationalist and one of the brightest stars of the Bengal School who played a remarkable role in reviving Indian art and today his artwork is designated as a National Treasure. Sadly, after independence he was brushed aside as a revivalist with the rest of the Bengal School and forgotten. Beginning with his birth centenary exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi (1983), there has been a gradual and more serious revaluation of his art and his contributions. Successive exhibitions, especially, Santiniketan: the Making of a Contextual Modernism (NGMA 1997), and Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose (San Diego Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and NGMA 2008) have enlarged that sphere of recognition considerably.

Holland Cotter, reviewing the Rhythms of India exhibition for the New York Times described Nandalal as, 'a polymath artist and teacher who through consistent and diligent generosity put his talent to the service of the life of his time... and is worthy of prolonged and intensive notice. The Philadelphia show immerses us, wonderfully, in both that life and that time. And it reminds us that every Museum of Modern Art in the United States and Europe should be required, in the spirit of truth in advertising, to change its name to Museum of Western Modernism until it has earned the right to do otherwise.' Cotter does not see Nandalal as an Indian revivalist and a traditionalist that he was once thought to be, he locates him not only in the context of India but within a larger global picture of modernism.

Nandalal Bose trained under Abanindranath Tagore as his student. Bose started traveling extensively to study historic sites throughout India. In 1909 he was invited by Lady Herringham to visit Ajanta to copy the ancient murals, a pivotal moment in his early career. Then shorty after graduating from the College, Nandalal was recruited to catalogue Abanindranath’s personal art collection, which was, according to some scholars, one of the most representative collections, at the time, of Asian art from parts of India, Persia, Egypt, China. Japan, and Southeast Asia. At an early stage Nandalal was influenced by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, the father of Indian art history, and by Okakura Kakuzo, an influential scholar of Japanese art history. In 1924 Nandalal travelled to China, Japan, and Indonesia, with Rabindranath Tagore. He became immersed in the history of Asian art.

Bose moved to Santiniketan at Rabindranath Tagore’s invitation in 1920, to become the Principal of Kala Bhavan, the art school at Visva Bharati University. There he was influenced by Rabindranath’s poetry, songs, plays, dances dramas, music, and the seasonal festivals of his rural abode. ‘The four seasons were overwhelming. The tribal villagers played drums and they danced, Hindu villagers had pujas, and they all worked in the rice fields. Streams crossed lush landscapes, birds called, flowers smelled, rain poured, water buffalos grazed, and the wind blew hot in the summer. Nandalal went with his family to the ocean shores or the mountains during summer vacations. During winters he took his students to places of archaeological or anthropological interest.’ (Supratik Bose, A Personal View of Nandalal Bose’s Art, 2019.)

A significant body of work by Nandalal Bose is inspired by the Japanese sumi-e style of ink painting. Although it is generally accepted that the majority of the sumi-e that Bose completed were painted towards the end of his life in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the current painting comes from a rare group of early sumi-e executed by Bose in 1929. What is particularly extraordinary about the current work is that it is considerably larger than almost all of the works completed in this medium later. Bose’s recent tour of Asia clearly had an impact on this early body of work, as he delved deeper into Japanese traditions producing rapid monochromatic ink and water paintings and landscapes evocative of the Daoist sensibilities that he came to revere.

Qunitanilla states ‘associations with the arts of Japan and China are evident throughout Nandalal’s lifetime in different ways. In his early years, especially during 1907-08, he used the colour wash technique from Abanindranath Tagore’s adaption of work by Nihonga artists such as Yokoyama Taikan and Hishida Shunso, which deemphasized contour lines. Next, between 1915 and 1916, Nandalal worked closely with Arai Kampo (1878-1945), who was a

Japanese artist residing in India, and from him he learned to use the brush to produce calligraphic line. In 1924, when he visited Japan, his scope of experience expanded further to various types of Chinese and Japanese art, the different techniques and compositional strategies of which he would experiment with, on an ongoing basis for the next twenty or more years.’ Sonya Rhie Quintanilla, Rhythms of India: The Art of Nandalal Bose, San Diego Museum of Art, 2008, p. 208.

In 1962 when Supratik Bose (Nandalal’s grandson) moved to the United States, he was gifted a body of work from the family collection. This painting belongs to this group of works. Shortly after Nandalal Bose’s death in 1966 his family gifted several thousand artworks to the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, which makes the number of artworks of this scale remaining in private hands exceptionally rare.