Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941)
Poet, Writer, Social reformer, Painter

Artist Somnath Hore (1921 – 2006)

dated 1980, Brush and Ink on paper
4.2 x 6 in. (10.7 x 15.2 cm.)

Rabindranath Tagore, celebrated as a poet, philosopher, and polymath, entered the world of visual art in his sixties—a phase marked by spontaneous creativity & unfettered by formal artistic training. His foray into painting emerged from an inner compulsion, a need to express the ineffable. His artworks reveal a deeply personal, dreamlike vision shaped by subconscious impulses, rich in psychological depth and symbolic abstraction. Favoring heavy outlines, exaggerated features, and shadowed forms, Tagore’s figures often appear ethereal and meditative, reflecting his philosophical temperament. He once said, “The world speaks to me in colours, my soul answers in lines.”

The small watercolor spontaneous brush work that captures Tagore’s likeness embodies this same spirit. Executed with sparse, expressive brushwork in black ink on muted paper, the portrait is both a tribute and a psychological study. Hore does not aim for realism but evokes presence through absence—using light and shadow, positive and negative space, to build a contemplative monumentality. The bowed head and withdrawn posture suggest reverence, perhaps even mourning, hinting at a shared worldview between the two thinkers—one poetic, the other political, yet both deeply humanist.

The second image, a pen-and-ink sketch of an unknown boy smoking, exemplifies Hore’s distinctive line-based technique. Rapid, obsessive cross-hatching and sharp outlines lend the figure both immediacy and unease. The boy’s face, carved out in nervous strokes, suggests vulnerability wrapped in a hardened exterior. His eyes are dark wells, and the cigarette seems less a rebellious prop than a crutch—a small flame against isolation. The minimal background emphasizes the figure’s isolation and inner world, echoing Hore’s broader concern with marginal lives often overlooked by mainstream narratives.

Somnath Hore, one of India’s most politically charged modernists, channeled personal and collective trauma into a minimalist, emotionally charged visual language. Deeply shaped by the Bengal famine, Tebhaga movement, and global war crises, Hore’s work was not merely documentary—it was existential. His bronze Wounds series, celebrated for its textured abstraction, visualized collective agony as tactile surface, blurring the line between scar and sculpture.

In both these portraits—one of a cultural titan, the other of an anonymous youth—Hore distills the human condition into a few essential marks. They are not merely portraits, but quiet meditations on memory, empathy, and survival.