Person · painter and lithographer
Raja Ravi Varma
/ɾaːd͡ʒaː ɾɐʋi ʋɐrmːɐ/
Also known as Ravi Varma, Rājā Ravi Varmā, Koil Thampuran of Kilimanoor, Ravi Varma Koil Thampuran
Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) was the Travancore painter who fused European academic oil technique with Hindu iconography and epic subjects. His wider reach came through print: the lithographic press he opened at Ghatkopar in Bombay in 1894, later moved to Malavli near Lonavala, turned his gods and heroines into cheap oleographs printed by the thousand. Critics have called him both the father figure of modern Indian art and the source of calendar-art kitsch.
- Date
- 1848 – 1906
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
Two of his granddaughters were adopted into the Travancore royal family in 1900, so the entire present royal house of Travancore descends from the painter.
Connections (6)
- TransmissionMahabharata
Ravi Varma is best known for scenes from the Mahabharata — Dushyanta and Shakuntala, Nala and Damayanti, Draupadi before Kichaka, Krishna as envoy — and the oleographs from his press, adapted mainly from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Puranas, carried those scenes into ordinary homes. His way of picturing the epic characters became part of how India imagines the epics, which is exactly what critics such as Ratan Parimoo held against his sentimental style.
- Associated withVadodara / Baroda
Many of Ravi Varma's paintings hang in the Laxmi Vilas Palace at Vadodara, and the palace's Durbar Hall hosts an annual festival in his memory at which the Raja Ravi Varma Award for visual arts is presented. The Baroda School painter Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, in his essay 'Ravi Varma in Baroda', argued that contemporary Indian art was never the same after Ravi Varma entered it, which makes Baroda both his gallery and his critical home.
- PatronageMysore Palace
The Mysore court was among Ravi Varma's patrons, and his painting of the Mysore king on horseback is on display at the Mysore Palace. The court's taste outlasted him: when Amrita Sher-Gil travelled across India trying to sell her paintings in the years before her death in 1941, the Maharaja of Mysore chose Ravi Varma's paintings over hers, a sign of how firmly his academic-epic manner still set princely collecting.
- Worked atMumbai
On the advice of the Travancore dewan T. Madhava Rao, Ravi Varma opened a lithographic press at Ghatkopar in Bombay in 1894, the largest and most innovative press in India at the time, and moved it to Malavli near Lonavala in 1899. Debt forced its sale in 1901 to his German printing technician Fritz Schleicher, who went on printing Ravi Varma images until a fire destroyed the factory in 1972.
- Alternative toAmrita Sher-Gil
When Sher-Gil travelled across India trying to sell her paintings, the Nawab Salar Jung of Hyderabad returned them and the Maharaja of Mysore chose Raja Ravi Varma's paintings instead. The two painters answer the same problem in opposite ways: Ravi Varma fused European academic technique with epic subjects for a mass public, while Sher-Gil used Post-Impressionism, Ajanta and miniature painting to paint ordinary villagers, and found almost no buyers in her lifetime.
- Associated withGovernment Museum, Chennai
The National Art Gallery within the Government Museum complex at Egmore, built in Indo-Saracenic style, houses rare European and Asian paintings, including works by Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906). Born at Kilimanoor in the princely state of Travancore, Ravi Varma widened his reach by making affordable lithographs of his paintings available to the public, which drew ordinary people into the fine arts and helped shape popular artistic taste.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Raja Ravi Varma"; "Amrita Sher-Gil". Erwin Neumayer & Christine Schelberger, Raja Ravi Varma and the Printed Gods of India (2003); Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods (2004).
Open Raja Ravi Varma in the repository →