Shantiniketan, Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy

Rabindranath Tagore invited Nandalal Bose to head the painting department at Kala Bhavana, India's first national art school, part of Visva-Bharati at Shantiniketan. Bose drew on local folk art, and illustrated Bengali primers for children.

Gandhi invited Bose to paint posters for the Haripura Congress session. Bose painted ordinary rural people (a drummer, a farmer ploughing in 'Tiller of the Soil') in bold tempera colours, recalling the patua scrolls of Bengal and the murals of Ajanta. Over 400 posters were made at Kala Bhavana.

Kala Bhavana trained artists who went on to teach all over India, such as K. Venkatappa in the south. They wanted art for the wider public, not only the rich.

Jamini Roy rejected his academic training, and adopted the flat, colourful style of Bengal's village folk paintings: women, children and rural life, simple and easy to copy (Woman with Child, 1940). He used seven basic colours from natural materials, on home-spun canvas.

British policy, meanwhile, favoured realism. Students of the Bombay School (under Gladstone Solomon) were given the murals for Lutyens' Delhi; Bengal School artists decorated India House in London, under supervision.