ABSTRACT
In India, as in other countries, nationalism was closely connected both with religion and with a revival of the arts; together they comprised the 'Indian Renaissance'.1 But paradoxically perhaps it was among Europeans and in the heart of the British establishment in Calcutta, that Indian art first became fashionable. Appreciation of 'oriental' art became an arena where members of the European and Indian élites in the city came together with a common programme. This movement has been analysed by Partha Mitter2 and by Tapati Guha-Thakurta. In her study of art and aesthetics in Bengal, Guha-Thakurta identifies what she calls a 'new orientalism' among European art critics at the beginning of the twentieth century, which became allied to Indian nationalist attempts to define an authentic national art.3 The Indian Society of Oriental Art (ISOA) was the pivot of this movement, and Woodroffe was regarded as one of its leading spirits from its foundation in 1907.4 He was one of a group of European connoisseurs who supported Abanindranath Tagore's New Bengal School of painting which was at the heart of ISOA's ideology and activities.
