Abanindranath Tagore, the nephew of Rabindranath Tagore, was born on 7th August 1871. He was born in the Jorasanko town of West Bengal. The younger bother of Gaganendranath Tagore, an eminent artist, Abanindranath was introduced to art in the 1880s. The painter tried to modernize Moghul and Rajput traditions as an answer to the growing influence of Western art under the British Raj.

Abanindranath Tagore believed in the traditional Indian techniques of painting. His philosophy existed in rejecting the materialistic art of the west and coming back to the Indian traditional art forms. He was very much influenced by the Mughal School of painting as well as Whistler's Aestheticism. In his later works, Abanindranath started integrating Chinese and Japanese calligraphic traditions into his style. The intention behind this move was to construct an amalgamation of the modern pan-Asian artistic tradition and the common aspects of Eastern spiritual and artistic culture.