The painting is recorded in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, India, under accession number NGMA-01226. The accessible museum catalogue does not provide an earlier ownership history or a specific acquisition date.
Figure Study, a painting by Rabindranath Tagore from 1935, depicts a woman holding a raised lamp. The painting as part of the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. Despite the catalogues title Figure Study, art historian R. Siva Kumar has descriptively named the piece Woman with Raised Lamp in Hand. The painting, which has been executed in pen and coloured ink on paper, measures 24.5 × 35 cm and is signed and dated in Bengali at the lower-left corner. This marks the painting as a work created on 17 March 1935.
Museums of India
The most distinctive feature of this work is its use of energetic lines to define the figure and create tonal variation. Instead of relying on blocks of colour, Tagore uses the interaction of lines and coloured ink to give the composition its expressive quality. The raised lamp creates a noticeable gesture, making the woman's figure appear dramatic and suggesting that the movement of the body is paramount to the composition. The simplicity of the subject allows the viewer to focus on the figure's posture and the visual relationship between line, colour and form.
National Gallery of Modern Art
Tagore started developing his independent painting practice in his late sixties. His painting often moved away from realistic representation towards imaginative, expressive and sometimes abstract. His treatment of human figures reveals an interest in gestures and emotional expression rather than presenting an accurate physical likeness. This work can therefore be understood as an example of his experimental approach to figure painting during the 1930s. The woman's raised lamp gives the composition a sense of purpose, while the vigorous lines add movement and visual intensity. The painting shows how Tagore could create an expressive image with a limited combination of materials.
This artwork shows a thin arm raising a small reddish lamp above a huge, dark, hooded figure, and I read it as a picture of quiet endurance. The lamp's fragile light held by someone who is mostly in shadow. The dense, driving lines suggest weight and hardship, while the warm ground around the figure keeps it from feeling hopeless. This fits Tagore’s way of painting from memory and the subconscious, so the woman reads more as a mood of watchfulness and resilience than as a specific person. Tagore didn’t title his works, and “Woman with Raised Lamp in Hand” is a later descriptive title, so this is only my interpretation.
