1871 - 1951

This delicately portrayed scene, depicts a crow and a cow, possibly in conversation, aside a thatched house. A faint hazy orange circle can be the setting sun. The medium of pastels, lends itself to give the painting a feeling of twilight.

The greenish-blue horizon suggests that scene attempts to capture the time of early dawn.

Leader of the Revivalist Movement in the field of Modern Indian Painting in Bengal, Abanindranath Tagore is also credited with a key contribution towards ushering in the renaissance in Indian painting. Abanindranath's inner urge for liberating Indian art was further inspired by Okakura, a great Japanese artist and art- critic who came to India with Swami Vivekananda. His work has a great delicacy of feeling, unity of concept, a highly sensitive range of color, tone, texture and poetic depth. His work was a mixture of traditionalism and innovation. He aimed at comparing nature in its transient forms and produce an image part object, part sensuous, both transposed into each other. But his vision on nature was always poetic, as was his personal form of expression.

In Abanindranth's pictures we see, for instance his adherence to the creation of Rasa (mood, flavor, taste) as being one of the ultimate aim of art. His use of analogy and suggestion to evoke emotion is very strong. Abanindranath Tagore continued to paint from the mental vision typical of Indian art, and did not use models. He has also categorically stated: "For let us not forget that it is the artist and his creation that comes first, and then the law giver and his codes of art. Art is not for the justification of the Silpa Sastra, but the Sastra for the elucidation of art."