Dr. Abinandranath Tagore

Dr. Abanindranath Tagore, June 1937 by Mukul Dey (1895-1989) Drypoint on paper - in the collection of the Prints, Drawings & Paintings Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London - which acquired the print within a year of its publication by donation of the connoisseur of prints, Campbell Dodgson - the sheet itself measured just over ten inches by just under eight; the preferred scales for a study as against the salon. The technique becomes in itself an argument: drypoint does not bite the copper with acid as etching does; the artist drags a steel needle across the bare copper, raising up a ridge of displaced metal - the burr - along the line; it is this burr which holds the extra ink in the press and makes the line soft or blooming as against the hard clean lines of the engraved copperplate. As the burr wears down after some only a few impressions, no two prints can be quite the same, and the print rests in a state of permanent instability; this was something Dey - trained in London under the eyes of Frank Short and Muirhead Bone, two of the very few professional draughtsmen of his day in India - understood well and applied consciously. Everything is held back but the man-no interiors, no furniture, save the suggestion of a low seat behind him; no wash; no colour, the paper naked cream and weighted down only by line. Abanindranath sits, bended slightly forward, three-quarters view, his head bowed. He wears a heavy shawl over his shoulders in thick, concentric ripples of shading, Dey rendering the shape from dark mass, piling up stroke upon stroke, the same way he depicted velvet and shadow in the dense remains of Rembrandt, whose style the young artist admired and studied. The face itself is lightly detailed, his domed head receding slightly into the close-cropped hair, the drawing of the eyes heavy-lidded and a little downward-slanting, the mouth set and faintly tired, suggesting a man well into his sixties; the bare feet planted flat and solid under his unassuming drapery, anchoring the figure in physical reality. Holding a small, terraced object in his right hand close to his body, the sculpture offered toward us, Dey shows us that the thing Abanindranath was making that day-at forty-five he had been making it for ten years and would continue till his death, it was said, for many more-was not a prop, but a fragment of biography, a sketch of the pen-and-ink structure that the aging painter had moved into, begun to obsess over, and had all but abandoned canvas and brush to inhabit fully. What that equation between those two men really adds up to in this print – under its guise as a picture of two men – is a proximity to work itself. The print itself is a picture of the pioneering – and puzzling – partnership that Dey was then from a very young age engaging in with his mentor, the older Tagore, Abanindranath, the artist who, nearly three decades earlier, had founded the Bengal School and Indian Society of Oriental Art specifically as an answer to the academic naturalism of the colonial art schools, in order to forge an indigenous visual idiom in the muck of Ajanta, Mughal miniature, and Rajput courtly artistry – not, that is, in the utopias of Europe. The fact that Dey is using an intaglio technique, learned in Chicago and finessed in London, to honor precisely this teacher is less irony than a delicate argument of its own: the 'native' nationalism of the Bengal School, at least as Dey had learned and now expressed it, was never a universal ban on foreign techniques, only a requirement that the subject matter and attentiveness to detail, behind the thing held in the hand, should be turned homeward. Dey does not paint his teacher back into the revivalist art idiom in order to seem faithful; he only looks at him, with the unhurried, cumulative patience that Rembrandt brought to the portrait of Amsterdam burghers, and leaves the thousands of tiny, incised lines to stand as their own form of prayer. The absence of setting on the picture on the other sheet – aside from a lone object (held) – invests everything on one subject's aging work ethic; working, still, even after the young boy's needle and plate had been handed off to another generation, for a lifetime. A second impression of this same 1937 plate, its burr visibly softer and its tone fainter, surfaced at a January 2026 auction, this serves as a reminder that a drypoint exists as a small population of related but non-identical pulls, not a single fixed object.