Works by Raja Ravi Varma

Raja Ravi Varma joined European academic art to Indian subjects, painting scenes from the epics and goddesses often modelled on Indian women, and spread his pictures as affordable lithographs.

Varma learned watercolour from Rama Swami Naidu and oil painting from the British portraitist Theodore Jenson. He is particularly known for paintings of episodes from two Mahabharata stories, Nala and Damayanti, and Dushyanta and Shakuntala. In Hamsa Damayanti, of 1899, a young woman in a red sari rests her cheek on her hand beside a white swan, which stands on a lotus leaf atop a stone pedestal. In Shakuntala, of 1898, a young woman in a forest clearing balances on one leg, holding the raised foot and looking back over her shoulder.

Many of the works below are portraits, mostly of women. His family had close ties to the Travancore royal house; in 1883 he painted Maharani Lakshmi Bayi standing in a red and gold sari, a medal on a pale blue bow at her shoulder and one hand resting on books. In There Comes Papa, of 1893, a woman in white and gold holds a small child on her hip, and a dog at her feet looks off to the left.

In 1894 he set up a lithographic press at Ghatkopar in Mumbai, whose oleographs, mostly of Hindu gods and goddesses, were still printed in their thousands after his death. Tilottama is a chromolithograph of 1896, not a painting: a woman in a red sari, bare above the waist, stands among clouds with a red ball in the air beside her raised hand.

Sources: Wikipedia, Sree Chitra Art Gallery, Wellcome Collection, Kowdiar Palace.