Rabindranath Tagore was primarily known as a writer, poet, playwright, philosopher and aesthetician, founder of a unique educational institution, Visva- Bharati, music composer and choreographer. Tagore's emergence as a painter began in 1928 when he was 67 years old. Beginning with scratchings and erasures on the pages of his manuscripts during the mid-20s of the 20th Century, he slowly moved towards drawing and painting independent images.

Between 1928 and 1940, Rabindranath painted more than 2000 images. He never gave any title to his paintings. Fed by memories and the subconscious, Rabindranath's art was spontaneous and dramatic. His images did not represent the phenomenal world but an interior reality.

Rabindranath veered towards abstraction in his figuration. Expressionism in European art and the primitive art of ancient cultures inspired him. Fantasy, wild imagination and an innate feel for the absurd gave a distinctive character to his visual language. The National Gallery of Modern Art has a representative collection of his imagery.

Art historian Ratan Parimoo has written "Landscape constitutes a major and constant theme in Rabindranath's oeuvre. And some of the most interesting, refined, expressive and mature paintings were done in this genre. They occur right from about 1929 spreading through all his phases till 1939, but the bulk of them are done in second half of 1930s."

Art historian R. Siva Kumar descriptively titles the work as Landscape with Tree in the Foreground.