A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c15.s8.t2.2

c15.s8.t2.2

This new movement on the art side has been enthusiastically supported by Mr. E. B. Havell, late Principal of the Calcutta School of Art, who felt keenly the futility of training Bengālī students on purely foreign methods, alien to their nature, and sought to turn their attention to the productions of the Indo-Persian and eighteenth-century Hindu schools as being more expressive of Indian ideals. With some difficulty Mr. Havell persuaded the authorities to let him have his way, and replace a collection of poor European works by a choice selection of Indian paintings. He found in Mr. Abanindro Nāth Tagore, now Vice-Principal of the School of Art, a willing coadjutor, and a painter of considerable power. Mr. Havell recognized in his colleague a real artist ‘who has come to pick up the broken threads of Indian pictorial tradition’, and credited him with ‘giving us a true interpretation of Indian spirituality, and an insight into that higher world, the fairy land of Eastern poetry and romance, which Eastern thought has suggested’.¹