Rabindranath Tagore.

Sir Muirhead Bone (1876-1953) was a Scottish artist known for his piquant drypoint etchings, draughtsmanship and watercolours. Bone originally trained as an architect at the Glasgow School of Art. After initially taking night classes, he turned to printmaking in 1898. Self-taught, his early works likely took the style of those he studied, chiefly Charles Meryon and James Whistler. In 1901 Bone moved to London, quickly gaining a reputation, moving in the same circles as art collector Campbell Dodgson and D.Y. Cameron, a contemporary of Bone in etching and a fellow Scotsman. In 1916, Bone successfully campaigned for the role of the first official British War Artist, filling the position in both World War One and World War Two. Between the World Wars, Bone continued to build up a considerable reputation, exhibiting frequently in both London and New York. A mentor of many young artists, he served as a trustee of the Tate Gallery, the National Gallery and Imperial War Museum. He was knighted in 1937.

Bone's watercolours and lustrous drawings are evidence of his incredible skill in depicting often grim wartime landscapes and human activity. However, it is in his drypoints that we can see his true mastery over architectural detail. His strengths are in rendering line and balance to create dynamic cityscapes, concerned primarily with the existence of buildings in all their states, including the comings and goings of their construction. Bone's architectural training is a fetchingly persistent ‘backbone’ in these works.

A native of Calcutta and the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, Rabindranath Tagore was a polymath who helped to reshape Bengali literature and music as well as Indian art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Known chiefly for his poetry, Tagore also wrote fiction, drama, essays and songs. Late in his life, after 1920, Tagore also created numerous paintings and drawings.

Bone depicts Tagore with masterful simplicity; highly detailed in the face, the velvety texture of his cap tangible and enticing. Following a tradition set by the etched portraits of the Old Masters such as Anthony van Dyck, where the head of the subject is the primary focus of the intaglio, Bone’s portraits also focused primarily on the head of the sitter, giving little depth or tone to the rest of the body. Another example of this in Bone’s work is Gavin asleep (1912), a Christmas card the Bone family sent out in 1913, which depicts only the sleeping head of the artist’s son in the upper left, while the rest of the picture plane is blank. Bone’s portraiture is a reminder of his descriptive talents outside of cityscapes.

Sources:

British Museum, http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioId=131762

David Cohen, ‘Bone, Muirhead’, Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press, accessed: 6 December 2017

Metropolitan Museum, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/747962

National Galleries Scotland, https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/sir-muirhead-bone

Wikipedia, 'Sir Muirhead Bone', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muirhead_Bone

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art   August 2018