Features of the painted portraits of Rabindranath Tagore. Iconography and symbolism

Abstract

The article examines numerous portraits of the outstanding Indian writer and philosopher of the twentieth century Rabindranath Tagore as a special phenomenon. The famous thinker was painted by dozens of artists, including Abanindranath Tagore, Gaganedranath Tagore, Mukul Chandra Dey, Atul Bose, William Rothenstein, Muirhead Bon, Boris Georgiev, Xu Beihun. Artists’ interest in the figure of the poet increased markedly after the award of the Nobel Prize to R. Tagore in 1913. Gradually, in the period of the 1920s – 1930s certain “rules” for the image of the thinker were formed tacitly. The authors of the article highlight the prerequisites for that phenomenon and analyze the existing iconography, which was especially actively manifested in the posthumous portraits of the poet. The article stresses several aspects and possible causes of the phenomenon. One of which is associated with the transition of Tagore’s artistic image into the symbol field: having gone beyond the boundaries of his native culture, R. Tagore’s portraits gradually began to carry a corpus of ideas related to the achievements in the field of science and art not only in India but also in the whole East, personifying its wisdom.