(1848-1906)
Raja Ravi Varma was an Indian artist from the princely state of Travancore famous for his paintings on the Mahabharata and Ramayana. His paintings are a fusion of Indian traditions with the techniques of European academic art.
Born on April 29, 1848, in the royal palace of Kilimanoor, a small hamlet about forty kilometres to the north of Trivandrum, in the southern state of Kerala in India, Ravi Varma belonged to a family of scholars, poets and artists. His parents were Umamba Thampuratti and Neelakandan Bhattathiripad. At the age of seven he started drawing on the palace walls of his home pictures of animals, acts and scenes from daily life, using charcoal.
His uncle Raja Raja Varma noticed the talent of Ravi Varma and gave him preliminary lessons in painting. At the age of 14, Ayilyam Thirunal Maharaja took him to Travancore Palace where he learnt water colours from the palace painter Rama Swamy Naidu. Ayilyam Thirunal exposed him to the famous work of Italian painters. Ravi Varma had been using the indigenous paints made from leaves, flowers, tree bark and soil which his uncle Raja Varma prepared for him. He was later given lessons in oil painting by a Dutch portrait artist Theodore Jensen. Through trial, error and hard work, Ravi Varma mastered working on this slow drying substance.
When Varma painted the portraits of the royal couple, his blazing talent far outshone the Dutchman’s. Listening to the music of veterans, watching Kathakali, going through the manuscripts preserved in ancient families and listening to the artistic interpretations of the epics, Ravi Varma polished his talent.
Ravi Varma married Bhageerathi Bayi the sister of Rani Lakshmi Bai of Travancore in 1866. They had three sons and two daughters. Their eldest son, Prince Kerala Varma, born in 1876, went missing in 1912 and was never heard of again. Their second son was Prince Rama Varma (b.1879), an artist who studied at the JJ School of Arts, Mumbai, married to Srimathi Gowri Kunjamma, sister of Dewan PGN Unnithan. Their next son was Prince Raja Raja Varma. Ravi Varma’s elder daughter, Princess Mahaprabha, who appears in two of his prominent paintings, was the mother of Maharani Sethu Lakshmi Bayi of Travancore. His other daughter was Princess Uma Bayi.
Two of his granddaughters, including Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, were adopted to the Travancore Royal Family, to which lineage the present Travancore Maharaja belongs.
Ravi Varma’s fame as a portrait artist soared with several important portrait commissions from the Indian aristocracy and British officials between 1870 and 1878. His clever portrayal added elegance to the personality of the protagonist, like unmasking the fragrance of a flower. The small town of Kilimanoor was compelled to open a post office, as letters with requests for paintings came from everywhere.
In 1873 the twenty-five year old artist won the first prize, the Governor’s Gold Medal in a competition held in Madras. The entry was sent to the International Exhibition at Vienna the same year and won a medal and a certificate of merit. He won the first prize again in the Madras Exhibition of 1874 and the ruler of Travancore presented the painting to the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) when he visited Madras in 1875. He won the first prize for the third time in 1876 for the painting that showed Shakuntala writing a letter to Dushyanta. Sir Monier Williams whose translation of Kalidasa’s play was published in 1855 sought the artist’s permission to reproduce it as the frontispiece in later editions.
Ravi Varma painted a life-size portrait of the Duke of Buckingham, the Governor of Madras in 1878 and much later of Lord Ampthill who too was a Governor of Madras. Sir Seshayya Sastri, a former Dewan of Travancore, invited Ravi Varma to his state and he painted portraits of members of the ruling family. Sir T Madhava Rao, who too had been the Dewan of Travancore, acquired two paintings by Ravi Varma. One of them, sent by him to the Poona exhibition of 1880, won the Gaekwad’s Gold Medal for the best painting.
Convinced that mass reproduction of his paintings would attract Indians to art, in 1894 he set up an oleography press called the Ravi Varma Pictures Depot in Bombay. For photo-litho transfers, the Pictures Depot relied on Phalke’s Engraving & Printing whose proprietor, Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, became famous as Dadasaheb of Indian cinema a few years later. Ravi Varma and Raja Raja Varma toured India, in search of images and landscapes for inspiration. On his return Ravi Varma painted a batch of pictures especially for reproduction at the Picture Depot. The aristocratic orientalism in his imagery was now replaced by more folkish, iconic and more marketable forms. Ravi Varma inspired calendar art was the forerunner of a huge movement in India.
Ravi Varma died on 2 October 1906 at Kilimanoor. Yet, the rich heritage of his paintings continues to charm and influence the art of India. The sensitivity and immense competence of this artist still remains unsurpassed.
T he Government of Kerala gives away the Raja Ravi Varma Puraskaram to promising artists. A college in Mavelikara district of Kerala was established to honour Ravi Varma.
A list of the prominent works of Ravi Varma:
Illustration by V Vijayakumar