Raja Ravi Varma was an Indian painter, born in 1848 at Kilimanoor Palace in Travancore, in what is now Kerala, who died in 1906. He painted the Hindu gods and the heroes of the epics as living people, in European oil paint, then printed them by the thousands. Most Indians who picture Lakshmi or Saraswati today picture his versions. Critics call him the father of modern Indian art and a maker of calendar pictures.
He gave the gods weight, shadow and faces you could meet in the street. Then he built a press so that a family without a palace could pin one of them to the wall.
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The images won, and he lost. The press Ravi Varma opened near Bombay in 1894, with his younger brother, carried his Lakshmi and Saraswati into homes across India. It also never paid. By 1899 it was deeply in debt, and a few years later it passed to a German printing technician, Fritz Schleicher, who kept printing the gods and added labels for advertisers.
The faces have a stranger history. Ravi Varma left no essay explaining how he chose the women who became his goddesses. What survives is the diary of his brother, who recorded the search for models, in one entry a woman in Hyderabad with, in his words, "a very charming face". His descendants say that more than one goddess wore the face of his daughter.
So the most copied gods in India were painted from hired models and relatives, in the manner of a European salon, by a man whom a famous critic would call vulgar in 1914.
What You'll Discover
Who taught him oil painting.
What won him the Governor's medal.
Whose faces he gave the goddesses.
Who ended up owning his press.
Who called his gods vulgar.