Untitled (Banyan Trees, Palm Tree, and Altar)

Artists

Description

In this monochromatic ink drawing, the trunk of a palm tree shoots upward through the mass of branches produced by a neighboring banyan tree. The scene recalls a well-known Bengali poem by Rabindranath Tagore, who founded the school where Nandalal Bose spent much of his life as a teacher and an artist: “One-legged palm tree/topping the other trees/peering at the sky […]”. A seated figure at a modest altar seen through the tree trunks lends the scene a sense of human scale.

Dimensions

38.7 x 28 cm (15 1/4 x 11 in.)

Provenance

Nandalal Bose, Santiniketan, West Bengal, India, (-1966), by inheritance; to his son, Biswarup Bose, Santiniketan, West Bengal, India (1966-1969 to 1971), gift; to Supratik Bose, grandson of Nandalal Bose, Cambridge, MA, (between 1969 and 1971-2014), gift; to the Harvard Art Museums.