From the India Today archives (2008) | Raja Ravi Varma: The royal touch
April 29 is the birth anniversary of Raja Ravi Varma, the self-taught artist who took Indian art from the walls of the privileged few and mainstreamed it
The first to make art fashionable was the gentleman artist Ravi Varma who was sought both by the British and the princely courts. His elegant and lustrous paintings cast a spell on the rest of India as he went on to break the monopoly of British artists. What was remarkable was that he was mostly self-taught. He had been introduced to the Maharaja of Travancore who wanted the court artist to teach him.
But neither he nor the Dutch artist Theodore Jensen present in court wanted to impart him their skills. He learnt mostly by watching them paint in the new medium of oil. Varma’s skills first came to light when he painted the portrait of the governor of Madras. Later, his Nair Woman with Jasmine Flowers in her Hair won him a gold medal at the Madras show and an art competition in Vienna in 1887.
The medium of oil allowed him to sensuously model his women as full-bodied presences. A distinctive feature of a work like Malabar Beauty, for instance, was that it transcended its settings to become a national emblem. This painting was part of a repertoire of 10 works which represented India at the World Columbian Order of 1893 and went on to win an award.
It was, however, his historical paintings which won him widespread recognition. The epic tales from the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranic texts became fodder for this new art. His lyrical works like
Hansa Damayanti or Rama Vanquishing the Sea became prototypes of innumerable printed images. Based on the proscenium stage and the settings of the Parsi theatre, they depended on the melodramatic moment where the protagonist would face the audience as it were.
If there were flaws in the naturalistic rendering, they were offset by the spectacle created by Victorian style columns, architecture and the lavish costumes. The penchant for the dramatic and the sentimental set into motion the basic recipe for the earliest films made by Dadasaheb Phalke and others. The ingredients of popular Hindi cinema, as we know it today, had their origins in the theatrical performances of the master artist.
Their popularity made the royal houses of Baroda, Mysore and Trivandrum commission large-scale mythological works which were history fashioned as melodrama. He brought about these by using the vocabulary of western academic tradition, blended with his influence of the Tanjore paintings and a lustrous sheen which was entirely his own.
Varma’s popularity reached its peak when he established a lithographic press in Bombay in 1892 where he was assisted by two German experts. The oleographs reproduced his paintings with a fair amount of authenticity and became available to the common man. The spread of plague and political disturbances in Bombay made him shift the press to Karla in 1899 and eventually sell it to one of the Germans.
By this time, the Ravi Varma oleographs could be seen in every household. The gods and goddesses were not multi-limbed but had an entirely human image, allowing for a national self-image to emerge. Not only was Varma the first to create an aura around art but also to transcend the barriers of class, language and region and reaching out to the ordinary man. If the elan with which he entered contemporary art is unmatched, he also left his mark on every aspect of it.
—The author is an art historian and curator
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The first to make art fashionable was the gentleman artist Ravi Varma who was sought both by the British and the princely courts. His elegant and lustrous paintings cast a spell on the rest of India as he went on to break the monopoly of British artists. What was remarkable was that he was mostly self-taught. He had been introduced to the Maharaja of Travancore who wanted the court artist to teach him.
But neither he nor the Dutch artist Theodore Jensen present in court wanted to impart him their skills. He learnt mostly by watching them paint in the new medium of oil. Varma’s skills first came to light when he painted the portrait of the governor of Madras. Later, his Nair Woman with Jasmine Flowers in her Hair won him a gold medal at the Madras show and an art competition in Vienna in 1887.
The medium of oil allowed him to sensuously model his women as full-bodied presences. A distinctive feature of a work like Malabar Beauty, for instance, was that it transcended its settings to become a national emblem. This painting was part of a repertoire of 10 works which represented India at the World Columbian Order of 1893 and went on to win an award.
It was, however, his historical paintings which won him widespread recognition. The epic tales from the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Puranic texts became fodder for this new art. His lyrical works like
Hansa Damayanti or Rama Vanquishing the Sea became prototypes of innumerable printed images. Based on the proscenium stage and the settings of the Parsi theatre, they depended on the melodramatic moment where the protagonist would face the audience as it were.
If there were flaws in the naturalistic rendering, they were offset by the spectacle created by Victorian style columns, architecture and the lavish costumes. The penchant for the dramatic and the sentimental set into motion the basic recipe for the earliest films made by Dadasaheb Phalke and others. The ingredients of popular Hindi cinema, as we know it today, had their origins in the theatrical performances of the master artist.
Their popularity made the royal houses of Baroda, Mysore and Trivandrum commission large-scale mythological works which were history fashioned as melodrama. He brought about these by using the vocabulary of western academic tradition, blended with his influence of the Tanjore paintings and a lustrous sheen which was entirely his own.
Varma’s popularity reached its peak when he established a lithographic press in Bombay in 1892 where he was assisted by two German experts. The oleographs reproduced his paintings with a fair amount of authenticity and became available to the common man. The spread of plague and political disturbances in Bombay made him shift the press to Karla in 1899 and eventually sell it to one of the Germans.
By this time, the Ravi Varma oleographs could be seen in every household. The gods and goddesses were not multi-limbed but had an entirely human image, allowing for a national self-image to emerge. Not only was Varma the first to create an aura around art but also to transcend the barriers of class, language and region and reaching out to the ordinary man. If the elan with which he entered contemporary art is unmatched, he also left his mark on every aspect of it.
—The author is an art historian and curator
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