Raja Ravi Varma can truly be called the father of modern Indian painting as he was the earliest Indian artist to begin the practice of modern art in the subcontinent. He was only 22 years old when he painted his first group portrait (a commissioned work) in the Western academic style, an oil on canvas, heralding the modern art movement in India.
Varma, one of India’s nine National Treasure artists, has several firsts to his credit. He was the first Indian modern artist to paint Indian themes in the studio setting in the essentially European medium of oils. He was also the first to democratise modern art by printing colour oleographs of his oil paintings of Hindu gods, goddesses and mythological characters, taking images of divinity to living and puja rooms of the country through affordable prints. Today, we know this class of images as calendar art.
Varma was born on April 29, 1848, in the Kilimanoor palace of the princely state of Travancore (present-day Kerala). He taught himself by observing European painters in the court, primarily the portraitist Theodore Jensen. Soon, Varma became a successful artist, making commissioned works for the royal houses of Travancore, Udaipur, and Baroda among others. He also made several portraits of British officers and other dignitaries. Chief subjects of his paintings comprised royal personages, as mentioned above, and characters and stories from the Hindu religious pantheon, mythological literature and other non-religious Sanskrit literature.
The artist’s skill lay in adapting the European medium of oil to make realistic paintings on Indian themes, adding scale and perspective in the western style to create hitherto unknown style of paintings in India. His academic style was emulated by several successful artists of the following generations, including stalwarts such as M. V. Dhurandhar. He opened the Ravi Varma Oleographic and Chromolithographic Printing Workshop in Lonavala in 1894—India’s first oleography press—to reproduce his oil paintings as prints.
A winner of several awards, Raja Ravi Varma passed away on October 2, 1906. The tremendous impact his practice had on the modern art of the country remains unparalleled to this day.