Chapter V · Style & Legacy

The bridge between two visual traditions

Ravi Varma forged a new visual language for India, and in doing so resolved an argument that had divided traditions for a century. The vision he found is still, more than a hundred years later, what most Indians picture when they picture a god.

The technique

Ravi Varma commanded four of the great achievements of world painting and made them his own: the single window-source of light; the modelling of flesh through chiaroscuro; linear perspective for architectural depth; and the grand tradition of narrative composition, figures arranged so the picture tells a story when read left-to-right.

From the Indian tradition that was his birthright he carried forward everything that mattered. The iconography. The hand-gestures (mudras) of the gods. The specific objects that identify a deity, Lakshmi's lotus, Saraswati's veena, Krishna's flute. The regional textiles, painted with an obsessive accuracy that turned every canvas into a kind of cultural dictionary. The Puranic scenes themselves.

What he made was new because no one had imagined it possible before. The Tanjore school painted gods with gold leaf and stylised faces. The Company School painted Indian life for British album collectors. Ravi Varma was the first to put a god on a canvas as if the god were sitting for a portrait.

East & West, on one canvas

What he inherited · What he mastered

From the Indian tradition

Inherited
  • The Puranic and epic subject matter
  • Iconographic attributes, lotus, veena, conch
  • The mudras and seated postures of deity portraiture
  • Regional textile detail, the saree, the dhoti
  • The female figure in shringara, the romantic mode
  • The compositional tradition of paired companions
×

From the world's painters

Mastered
  • Oil on canvas, a medium then new to India
  • Chiaroscuro, light and shadow, a single window-source
  • Linear perspective for architectural depth
  • Naturalistic flesh tones modelled in glazes
  • Grand narrative composition
  • The gold-framed portrait format
Chapter VI · The long shadow

What Indian visual culture inherited

i

Cinema

Dadasaheb Phalke, the father of Indian cinema, worked closely with the Ravi Varma Press before making Raja Harishchandra (1913). Indian mythological cinema for the next forty years took its costumes, its lighting, and its compositions wholesale from Varma's canvases.

ii

Calendar art

The "calendar god", a particular look, a particular palette, is descended from Ravi Varma oleographs. Companies like Sivakasi printed billions of devotional images through the twentieth century, all working in the visual grammar he established.

iii

Comic books

Amar Chitra Katha, the comic series that taught generations of Indian children their mythology, drew its costumes, its gestures, and its compositions directly from Ravi Varma. It is, in effect, his book.

iv

Advertising

After Schleicher took over the press, Ravi Varma's imagery moved into every corner of Indian commercial life, calendars, textile-mill prints, advertisements for the new century. The conventions of early-twentieth-century Indian commercial art, the woman in the saree, the cherubic baby, are all downstream of him.

v

A living conversation

More than a century on, Indian artists are still in conversation with him, restaging his compositions, returning to his iconography, working in the visual grammar he left them. The dialogue he opened with the Mahabharata and the Puranas has never gone quiet.

vi

The reckoning

His canvases now anchor Indian art at auction. Yashoda Adorning Krishna, sold in April 2026, became the most expensive Indian painting ever sold. A century on, the world is finally recognising the work at something nearer its true measure.

Where to see his work

On the wall, today

The canvases live, mostly, in the cities that commissioned them, Travancore, Mysore, Baroda, and in the great public collections of independent India. A short directory, for the traveller.

In India
Thiruvananthapuram · Kerala

Sree Chitra Art Gallery & Raja Ravi Varma Gallery

134 works · 46 paintings, 14 oleographs, 16 sketches

The largest single collection. Hamsa Damayanti, Draupadi at the Court of Virat, and the canvases the Maharaja of Travancore commissioned from him in 1895–96. A dedicated Ravi Varma wing opened in September 2023.

Plan a visit
Vadodara · Gujarat

Lakshmi Vilas Palace

The Baroda commission · 14 mythological canvases

The fourteen Puranic paintings the Gaekwad commissioned for the Durbar Hall in 1888–90, Sita Swayamvaram, Vishvamitra and Menaka, Arjuna and Subhadra, Nala Damayanti. Plus around two dozen further canvases including family portraits.

Wikipedia
Mysore · Karnataka

Sri Jayachama Rajendra Art Gallery

Jaganmohan Palace

Home of Galaxy of Musicians (1889) and other canvases commissioned by the Maharaja of Mysore. Housed in the Jaganmohan Palace, itself part of the Mysore court's nineteenth-century cultural project.

Wikipedia
New Delhi

National Gallery of Modern Art

19 artworks

The capital's principal collection of Ravi Varma paintings, alongside the wider canon of modern Indian art. The NGMA also runs a virtual tour of his work.

Virtual tour
Hyderabad · Telangana

Salar Jung Museum

Including The Stolen Interview

India's third-largest museum holds a notable group of Ravi Varma works in its painting galleries.

Visit
Chennai · Tamil Nadu

Government Museum, Egmore

A dedicated Ravi Varma painting gallery

Madras was the city of his first major prize, in 1873. The Government Museum on Pantheon Road keeps a gallery of his work in the country he started his career in.

Visit
Kolkata · West Bengal

Victoria Memorial

Portrait of T. Madhava Rao

The portrait of the former Dewan of Travancore, the man who, in the 1890s, told Ravi Varma to start a press of his own, hangs in the Victoria Memorial's painting collection.

Visit
Kilimanoor · Kerala

Kilimanoor Palace

Self-portrait, family material

The palace where Ravi Varma was born and died. An intimate collection: the self-portrait, sketches, family ephemera, open to visitors by arrangement.

Wikipedia
Outside India
London · United Kingdom

Victoria & Albert Museum

Selected works

The V&A holds Ravi Varma material in its South Asian galleries, part of the museum's wider collection of nineteenth-century Indian painting.

Visit
Online · Worldwide

Google Arts & Culture

High-resolution scans

Browse the canvases at high resolution from anywhere, paintings drawn from the Kerala Museum and other Indian institutions, with curatorial notes.

Open
Phalke & the screen

When the gods learned to walk

In 1913, Dadasaheb Phalke shot India's first feature film, Raja Harishchandra. He had spent the years before working at the Ravi Varma Press, hand-colouring oleographs, separating tones for the lithographic stones. The film's compositions, its way of staging gods and kings, are direct descendants of the canvases he had been printing.

For the next four decades, Indian mythological cinema would dress its gods, light its goddesses, and stage its epic confrontations exactly the way Ravi Varma had taught the subcontinent to picture them. To watch a Phalke film, or a 1940s Prabhat Studio production, is to watch Ravi Varma's paintings learn to move.

Jatayu Vadham, a cinematic composition
Jatayu Vadham · 1906
The dying eagle, a king in a chariot, a movie-still avant la lettre.
The story of contemporary Indian art was never the same after Ravi Varma had entered it.
, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, "Ravi Varma in Baroda"
In my childhood, when Ravi Varma's age arrived in Bengal, reproductions of European paintings on the walls were promptly replaced with oleographs of his works.
, Rabindranath Tagore
In Closing

He gave the gods a face.

And then, with the press at Lonavla, he democratized it, putting that face within reach of every home in India. We have been looking at it ever since.

Return to the gallery Back to the start