Nobel laureate for literature, Rabindranath Tagore, was not only a poet, author, playwright but also an artist.
His career as a painter dates from around 1928 though he is known to have drawn sketches throughout his career.
What began as doodling on his working manuscripts became an obsession after 1930 and it is thought that in the last ten years of his life he produced over two thousand pictures. His work was publicly displayed for the first time in Paris in 1930 followed by an exhibition in Calcutta in 1931.
As the country gets set to celebrate his 150th birth year, 12 of his paintings, gifted by the artist himnself to Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst of Dartington Hall in 1939, are in the news as they have been planned to be put on auction by Sotheby's at London on June 15, 2010 in aid of the Darlington Hall Trust.
"This news deeply disturbed us. These Elmhirst collections of Gurudev's paintings are priceless treasures of Indian culture," the West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee wrote to the Prime Minister, requesting him to take measures to bring back these paintings to India.
The auction also comes at a time when the government is planning to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Tagore and the Prime Minister has appointed two committees to consider policies and lay down guidelines for the celebrations. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself heads one of these committees.
Amid demands from several quarters to stop the auction of paintings, the PM has today given an assurance that the issue will be examined but said the government has no legal rights over the rare works.
Singh, who chaired the first meeting of National Committee for Commemoration of 150th Birth Anniversary of Tagore, said the government will surely examine the issue of bringing back the rare paintings, but also pointed out that the government didn't have any legal rights over the paintings.
The Prime Minister also recalled the hurdles the government faced while stopping the auction of Mahatma Gandhi's personal belongings, including his iconic round glasses, in New York last year.
The government had tried to stop the auction through the Indian Consulate there and had also worked on other options, including the legal route, to stop the auction.
The Delhi High Court had also stayed the auction, but it went on in New York and the articles were eventually bought by industrialist Vijay Mallya.
The 12 Tagore paintings under question belong to the Dartington Hall estate in London's South Devon and have a combined pre-sale estimate of 250,000 pounds. Tagore visited Dartington a number of times.
Apart from the paintings, it holds a huge archive of photographs, letters and other ephemera relating to Tagore.
