Abanindranath Tagore

Abanindranath Tagore was born in Jorasanko, Calcutta on 7th August 1871, At the age of twenty, he learnt pastels and oil painting from, European painters. Abanindranath Tagore was the first major exponent of Swadeshi values in Indian art, He believed that Western art was materialistic in character, and that India needed to return to its own traditions to recover spiritual values. His finest achievement was the Arabian Nights series which was painted in 1930. In these paintings he uses the Arabian Nights stories as a means of looking at colonial Calcutta and picturing its emergent cosmopolitanism.