Paintings and drawings of Rabindranath Tagore: a bibliometric study

Abstract

Using bibliometric techniques, the paper attempts to study 1,573 paintings and drawings by Rabindranath Tagore available at Rabindra-Bhavana, Visva-Bharati. Rabindranath paintings cover 27 themes. The distribution of themes do not follow Bradford law. He has drawn seventy-one types of figures and seven types of human faces. He used various colours and materials for his pictures. Only pen ink was used by him 466 paintings. In others, pen ink was used along with 21 combinations. Plain paper, cards, silk, wood, wooden box, wooden board, varnished paper, glazed paper, exercise book, pasted card, pasted paper were used for painting including the back of a letter. Rabindranath signed 903 paintings in Bengali, 53 in English, and two both in Bengali and English. He did not sign on 615 of his paintings. Of the 1,573 paintings, Rabindranath mentioned places of paintings only in 48 cases, of which 29 places are in India. 1150 paintings do not reveal the dates. From the dated paintings it appears that Rabindranath on some dates created five to six paintings. Rabindranath gave titles to his paintings only in 46 cases. All these titles are in Bengali.