A life in four palaces

Ravi Varma was born Koil Thampuran at Kilimanoor Palace, fifty kilometres north of the Travancore capital. The title "Raja" came to him later, conferred personally by Lord Curzon in 1904, an honour he would carry for the rest of his life. His mother Uma Ambabayi Thampuratty was a poet who composed verses for Kathakali; his father a Sanskrit scholar of Ayurveda. The household ran on epics, on song, on the slow ceremonies of palace life.

His first teacher was his uncle Raja Raja Varma, drawing lessons in the palace, charcoal sketches of horses and gods. At thirteen the Maharaja of Travancore, Ayilyam Thirunal, summoned him to court and let him watch the painters there. It was at court that he first saw a European canvas, work by Theodore Jensen, and decided that this was what painting could do.

Ravi Varma taught himself oil painting. Naidu's assistant Arumugham Pillai shared what he could of the medium; Jensen, on a visit, offered guidance. The rest, Ravi Varma figured out on his own, through observation, instinct, and relentless practice. He mastered the medium that would make him famous.

In 1873 a panel of his work, including the original Shakuntala, was shipped to the Madras Fine Arts Exhibition, then on to Vienna. He won the Governor's gold medal at one and acclaim at the other. By the end of the decade he was the most-commissioned portraitist in southern India, painting Indian royals in their court regalia, British administrators in their starched whites, and noblewomen lit, increasingly, by an almost European window-light.

His brother C. Raja Raja Varma joined him in 1880 and never left. Raja painted the backgrounds, the landscapes, the architectural perspectives, the lush foliage that grounds figures like Damayanti and her swan. Ravi painted the figures. Their elder sister, Mangalabai Thampuratty, was an oil painter too, and advised on the work. Ravi Varma worked at the heart of a family studio, his vision, supported by a household of artists who shared his discipline.

The Gaekwad of Baroda, Sayajirao III, became the artist's most consequential patron. In 1888 he commissioned fourteen mythological paintings for the Durbar Hall of his new Lakshmi Vilas Palace, Krishna scenes, episodes from the Mahabharata. They are the canvases for which Varma is now most famous, and they hang in Vadodara still.

On the advice of T. Madhava Rao, the former Dewan of Travancore, Ravi Varma started a lithographic printing press in Ghatkopar in 1894 and shifted it five years later to Malavli, near Lonavla, where the air was drier and the German technology, imported with a German technician, Fritz Schleicher, could run cleanly. The press produced oleographs of Hindu gods and goddesses, scenes from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, the great panel of musicians.

It is hard, today, to overstate what this did. Ravi Varma was the first to put great art on the wall of an ordinary Indian home. His prints were accessible, beautiful, and unmistakably Indian, and within a decade they had become a household fixture across the subcontinent.

In 1901 Ravi Varma transferred the press to Fritz Schleicher, who ran it commercially for decades. A 1972 fire destroyed the factory at Lonavla, taking most of the original lithographic stones with it. What survives of his oleographic work is, mostly, what was already on people's walls.

Ravi Varma died at Kilimanoor on 2 October 1906, in the palace where he was born.

In 1904 Viceroy Curzon had given him the Kaisar-i-Hind Gold Medal, and the title Raja, which he carries today as if it were inherited. It was not. It was his.

Ravi Varma's younger son Rama Varma, known across Kerala as the Artist Thampuran, was born in 1879 and inherited his father's hand. From 1897 to 1903 he studied at the Sir J. J. School of Art in Bombay, then returned home to Mavelikara, set up his own studio, and worked beside his father until Ravi Varma's death in 1906.

He painted portraits, history scenes, and figures from legend, among them Ajavilapam (1934), a portrait of Sir Winston Churchill (1934), a study of Rana Pratap (1934), and, in 1948, a portrait of his father. Many of his canvases carry the unmistakable proportions, the cast of light, the fall of cloth that he had learned at Ravi Varma's side.

He was, in the words of the Kerala Museum's record of him, "an artist, teacher, and social activist", and the driving force behind the establishment of the Raja Ravi Varma College of Fine Arts in Mavelikara, known locally as the Painting School. It welcomed students from every section of Keralite society, and stands today.

Rama Varma married Gowri Kunjamma, sister of Dewan P. G. N. Unnithan, and had ten children. The line he carried forward runs, four generations on, to the descendant who has gathered this site.