THE DARTINGTON Trust, which was set up as a replica of social experiment at Santiniketan, said on Friday that it hopes that the 12 paintings by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore, to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in London on June 15, will go back to India.
“However, the Trust cannot gift the Tagore paintings even if it wanted to,” Dartington Trust chief executive Vaughan Lindsay told this newspaper in an interview on Friday afternoon. The trust, which was set up by Tagore’s friends Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, is selling 12 Tagore paintings to raise funds. “The charity rules in this country do not allow any assets held in Trust to be gifted away,” Mr Lindsay said in a telephonic interview from his office in Devon, southwest England. “Our hands are really tied. We can only sell them at market rates and the Sotheby’s auction would be the right way to do that,” he added.
Mr Lindsay said that he understands the strong reaction the sale of paintings has evoked in India. “It is a very sensitive area. I do hope that they go back to India,” he said. However, he said that the Indian government has not been in touch with him or the trust in order to try and negotiate over the sale of the 12 Tagore paintings. He was unwilling to reveal whether the Trust would be interested in talking to the Indian government. “There has been no contact from the Indian government,” he said when asked if he would be willing to negotiate with India over the sale of the paintings. He reiterated that the paintings would have to put on open market to realise their full market value. The Trust hopes to raise £250,000 from the sale of the paintings. “Let’s wait and see,” Mr Lindsay said when asked about the Sotheby’s estimated sale price for the paintings. The sale will support the Trust’s “ambitious new plans to expand its charitable programmes in the arts, social justice and sustainability.” The Elmhirsts set up Dartington as a replication of Tagore’s Santiniketan experiment. Tagore had visited Dartington a number of times. The decision to sell the paintings was a “very difficult one,” Mr Lindsay said. “We wanted to rationalise our collection and have more artefacts and art objects than we could display. So we decided to focus on Tagore memorabilia directly linked to Dartington,” he said.