Raja Ravi Varma Begins His Career

1873

Raja Ravi Varma wins the gold medal at the Madras Fine Arts Exhibition (in present-day Chennai) for his painting Nair Lady Adorning Her Hair made in the same year. He begins a career of using Naturalism and Academic Realism to render portraits of Indian royalty, such as The Maharani of Travancore (1889), and mythological scenes, such as Shakuntala (1898).

His depiction of women popularises the saree as a pan-Indian, all-occasion garment, including for mythical figures. His oil paintings and the Raja Ravi Varma Press (to be set up in 1894) which produce lithograph prints of Hindu deities, will create a populist visual vocabulary that will continue to be recognised and reproduced today, despite criticism voiced by Indian Modernists.

Bibliography

Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. “Westernisation and Tradition in South Indian Painting in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906).” Studies in History 2, no. 2 (1986): 165–95.

Mitter, Partha. Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850-1922: Occidental Orientations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997.