Prodyot Coomar Tagore

Maharaja Bahadur Sir Prodyot Kumar Tagore KCIE (September 17, 1873 – August 28, 1942) was a leading land owner, philanthropist, art collector, and photographer in Kolkata, India. He belonged to the Pathuriaghata branch of the Tagore family.

Prodyot Kumar was the eldest son and heir of Sir Jatindramohan Tagore (1831–1908), who had been honoured with the hereditary title of Maharaja Bahadur in 1891. Like Jatindramohun himself, Prodyot Kumar was adopted. His biological father was Sourindra Mohan Tagore (1840–1915), who was Jatindramohun’s brother. Sourindra Mohan was a distinguished musician and musical scholar. Like his natural and adoptive fathers, Prodyot was a man of “learning, taste and enlightenment.” .

Gopi Mohan Tagore, Prodyot Coomar's great grandfather, had begun the Tagore family's art collection with the assistance of the British artist George Chinnery, who had visited Calcutta in 1803. Prodyot Coomar greatly expanded the collection, and at his death it was the largest collection of European art in India. Works by Van Dyck, Rubens, Constable, Veronese and Murillo as well as British painters who were active in Calcutta in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Jacomb-Hood, Chinnery and Thomas Daniell, covered the walls of the Tagore palaces. In later life, Prodyot Coomar donated extensive collections of Company Paintings to the fledgling collection of the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata. When the Tagore collection was finally dispersed in the 1950s, a number of pictures and drawings were acquired by the institution for its permanent collection.

...
Wikipedia