Raja Ravi Varma was an Indian painter and artist. He is considered among the greatest painters in the history of Indian art. His works are one of the best examples of the fusion of European academic art with a purely Indian sensibility and iconography.
Varma was born into an aristocratic family in Travancore state. He showed an interest in drawing from an early age, and his uncle Raja Raja Varma, noticing his passion for drawing on the palace walls, gave him his first rudimentary lessons in painting. When Varma was 14, Maharaja Ayilyam Thirunal, ruler of Travancore at the time, became a patron of his artistic career. Soon the royal painter Rama Swamy Naidu started teaching him to paint with watercolours. Three years later Varma began to study oil painting with Theodore Jensen, a Danish-born British artist.
Varma was the first Indian to use Western techniques of perspective and composition and to adapt them to Indian subjects, styles, and themes. He won the Governor’s Gold Medal in 1873 for the painting Nair Lady Adorning Her Hair. He became a much-sought-after artist among both the Indian nobility and the Europeans in India, who commissioned him to paint their portraits.
Varma adapted Western realism to pioneer a new movement in Indian art. In 1894 he set up a lithographic press in order to mass-produce copies of his paintings as oleographs, enabling ordinary people to afford them. That innovation resulted in the tremendous popularity of his images, which became an integral part of popular Indian culture thereafter.
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.
Credit : Britannica
Picture Credit : Google
