Untitled Dancing Girl

What it is

This untitled painting was made by Rabindranath Tagore, who began painting seriously only in his sixties. It shows an abstract, stylized figure with flowing curving lines and striped bands in red, orange and dark brown tones against a dark background.

Why it matters

Tagore's paintings are valued not for technical polish but for their raw, untrained expressiveness — he had no formal training as a painter and developed his visual style from doodles and corrections on his manuscripts. This work shows how a man famous as a poet and philosopher also became a significant, self-taught visual artist in his final decades.

Look closer

• What mood do the colours and curving lines create?
• How might painting without formal training change what an artist is free to do?
• What does it suggest about Tagore that he took up a whole new art form so late in life?