Untitled (Banyan Trees, Palm Tree, and Altar)

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.