Gaganendranath Tagore
1867-1938
Gaganendranath Tagore (1867 to 1938) was a pioneering modern Indian painter, widely regarded as India's first cartoonist and its earliest experimenter with Cubism.
Born into the illustrious Tagore family of Jorasanko, Kolkata, he was the elder brother of Abanindranath Tagore and cousin of Rabindranath. Largely self-taught, he came to painting late, around age thirty-eight. He first absorbed Japanese brush techniques and co-founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art in 1907. He is best known for his satirical caricature portfolios of 1917, which skewered colonial-era hypocrisy and the Anglicised babu class. Later, between 1920 and 1925, he became the only Indian painter of his era to work seriously in a Cubist idiom.