E. B. Havell became superintendent of the Calcutta School of Art in 1896 and set out to reorient its teaching around Indian rather than European models^[2]. In his own account of the change, he described selling the school's collection of Western paintings and using the proceeds to buy Indian work instead, a decision that provoked a strike among students who had enrolled to master British academic style and a hostile campaign in the Bengali press^[3]. Havell called the Mughal paintings he assembled for his students "a treasure resting in the chest in our own home"^[2]. Tagore, a nephew of the writer Rabindranath Tagore, was already a working painter in the Western academic mode when he met Havell in 1896. Havell's tutelage sent him into a close study of Mughal painting, and the new work that followed was shown at the Calcutta School of Art in 1900, breaking from the illusionistic technique Tagore had trained in^[1].

Tagore's Mughal-influenced paintings won the gold medal at the Congress Industrial Exhibition in 1901 to 1902, and in 1903 he showed further Mughal-themed work, including The Passing of Shah Jahan, at the Delhi Durbar Exhibition of Indian Arts and Crafts staged by Lord Curzon, where it took the silver medal^[1]. That painting was described at the time as an attempt to bring emotion into what critics saw as the more formal, courtly conventions of Mughal picture-making, and the recognition it earned marked Tagore out as the leading figure of a new Indian school rather than a follower of the Bombay academic style associated with the painter Ravi Varma^[1]. Journey's End sits within this body of work, made in the wash-and-line technique Tagore had adopted from Mughal and, later, Japanese sources, though no exhibition record for this specific painting survives.

The 1905 partition of Bengal by the British administration inflamed nationalist sentiment across the province, and the Bengal School's aesthetic became bound up with the Swadeshi movement that grew out of it^[1]. Tagore's watercolour Bharat Mata, painted that same year, personified the Indian nation as a robed female figure and became one of the defining images of the period^[1]. Tagore began teaching at the Calcutta School of Art in 1905, shaping a generation of students in his new manner, and by 1907 the Indian Society of Oriental Art had been founded to carry the style beyond Calcutta on a national footing^[1]. Journey's End was painted within this same circle of practice and belongs to the wider argument the Bengal School was making in these years: that an Indian subject demanded an Indian technique, not an imported one.