Ravi Varma

Ravi Varma (born April 29, 1848, Kilimanoor Palace, near Trivandrum, Travancore princely state, British India [now Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India]—died October 2, 1906, Kilimanoor Palace) was an Indian painter best known for uniting Hindu mythological subject matter with European realist and naturalist painting styles. He was one of the first Indian artists to use oil paints and to master the art of lithographic reproduction of his work. In addition to incidents in Hindu mythology, Varma painted many portraits of Indian and British people in India.

Early education in art

Varma was born into an aristocratic family in the erstwhile princely state of Travancore in southwestern India. He showed an interest in art from an early age, drawing on the walls of the family mansion with chalk and charcoal. His uncle Raja Raja Varma, an artist in his own right, noticed his passion for art and gave him his first rudimentary lessons in painting. When Varma was 13 or 14 years old, Ayilyam Thirunal, ruler of Travancore, became a patron of Varma’s early artistic career and allowed him to watch and learn from painters who practiced at the court. Varma was keen to learn oil painting but Ramaswamy Naidu, the only palace painter experienced in the medium at the time, refused to teach him, perhaps unwilling to give away his secrets to a potential rival. Arumugham Pillai, one of Naidu’s assistants, eventually taught Varma the basics of the technique in secret. Varma was later allowed to observe the oil painting of Theodore Jensen, a Danish-born British artist who came to the Travancore court in 1868, though Jensen also refused him formal training.

Career as a professional artist

Royal portraits

In 1870 Varma began his career as a professional painter—considered an inappropriate occupation for an aristocrat at the time—with a commissioned portrait of a family in Calicut (now Kozhikode). Shortly afterward he painted a portrait of Thirunal and his wife, which led to his appointment as the palace artist at Trivandrum (now Thiruvananthapuram). Varma won the Governor’s Gold Medal for the painting Nair Lady Adorning Her Hair in 1873 and for A Tamil Lady Playing the Sarabat the following year. These wins in India and another award at an international exhibition in Vienna made him a much-sought-after artist among both the Indian nobility and the Europeans in India, who commissioned him to paint their portraits.

Britannica Quiz

Can You Match These Lesser-Known Paintings to Their Artists?

Mythology and religious themes

Alongside portraits, Varma increasingly painted subjects from Indian mythology. In 1876 his exhibition of Shakuntala Writing a Love Letter to Dushyanta, based on characters in the Indian epic Mahabharata and the subject of a Sanskrit play by poet Kalidasa, was met with much acclaim. As his reputation grew, Varma was commissioned by royal families such as those of Baroda and Mysore to paint portraits and scenes from the Mahabharata and another Indian epic, the Ramayana. His paintings, including Harischandra in Distress, Jatayu Vadha, and Shri Rama Vanquishing the Sea, captured dramatic moments from Indian mythology. He used European techniques of perspective and composition to render realistic oil paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses as well as characters in the epics and the Puranas.

Idealized depictions of women are pervasive across Varma’s oeuvre, both mythological and non-mythological. Often represented as sensuous and adorned in finely detailed jewelry and saris, these female forms are the predominant subjects of 10 paintings that Varma sent to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where he was awarded two gold medals.

Did You Know?

In 1904 Varma was awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind, a medal to recognize distinguished public service in British India, which, until then, had been awarded exclusively to those engaged in trade and commerce. It was the inclusion of the title “Raja” in the citation of this award that led to him being popularly called Raja Ravi Varma.

Printing press

In 1894 Varma set up a lithographic press in order to mass-produce copies of his paintings as oleographs (prints on cloth to resemble oil paintings), enabling ordinary people to afford them. Because of financial difficulties, he sold the press and the copyrights for many of his paintings seven years later to a German printing technician, who began printing Varma’s artwork on a wide variety of products, including calendars and matchboxes. Because the press enabled his artworks to be widely distributed, Varma’s images of Hindu gods and goddesses, especially those of Saraswati and Lakshmi, have become some of the most recognizable and enduring representations of these figures in Indian households.

Legacy and criticism

Despite the dismissal of Varma’s work by some as “calendar art” because of its commercialization, interest in his work has remained constant. In 1997, for example, The Begum’s Bath sold for a record price for an Indian artist at the time. Works such as The Maharashtrian Lady, Shakuntala, The Milkmaid, Expectation, and Pleasing exhibit Varma’s characteristic sense of beauty and grace. Varma’s artworks and visual motifs have influenced cinema, literature, advertisements, music, and popular culture, including a popular comic book series on Indian mythology published by Amar Chitra Katha.

Are you a student?

Get a special academic rate on Britannica Premium.

Subscribe

Varma was criticized severely by later artists who saw the content of his work as only superficially Indian because, despite depicting mythological Indian themes, it imitated Western styles of painting. That view was instrumental in the formation of the Bengal School of Art (or Bengal school), whose members explored ancient Indian artistic traditions with a modernist sensibility. Varma’s representations of Indian women have sometimes been panned for being stereotypical, exclusionary, and overly eroticized.