Ravi Varma was India’s great portraitist of the 1800s and then became something bigger with a printing press, and a joke about motorcycles explained to me what he had made
Tuesday, Cleaning Brushes
All year I have been reading and listening about nineteenth-century India through the eyes of writers. This week, at last, I found a painter. A portrait painter. One of my own.
I am slightly ashamed that I had never heard of him. He is, I now learn, the most famous artist India ever produced. There are probably more copies of his pictures in the world than of any painter in history. Hundreds of millions of people know his work without knowing his name.
His name was Ravi Varma.
The Portraitist
He was born in 1848 in a small princely state in the far south-west of India, into a family of minor nobility connected to the ruling house. He drew on the walls as a child. An uncle noticed.
At that time oil painting, the European kind, on canvas, with shadows and perspective, was almost unknown among Indian artists. A visiting European painter was working at the local court. He would not teach the boy. He regarded his methods as trade secrets. So Ravi Varma watched him work, from across the room, and taught himself.
I love that. Every portrait painter has stood behind someone better and stolen with their eyes.
By his twenties he was painting the maharajas. He had what we all want: the ability to get a likeness, flatter slightly and make silk look like silk. He traveled from court to court. Every prince in India wanted to be done by him. British governors sat for him. He won a medal at an exhibition in Vienna in 1873 and more at the great fair in Chicago in 1893.
If he had stopped there he would be a footnote. A skilled society painter. I know the type. I am the type.
The Other Thing He Did
But he had a second subject. He painted the gods.
The stories of the Hindu epics had always been shown in art, but in older, flatter, more formal styles, on temple walls and in miniatures. Ravi Varma painted them the way a European academic painter would paint a scene from Homer. Real bodies. Real weight. Light falling from one side. Faces with expressions.
He took as his models the women he saw around him. So his goddesses wear the sari as it was worn in his own time, and have the faces of Indian women, and stand in rooms and gardens you could walk into.
There is one of a girl from an old play, pretending to take a thorn from her foot so she can look back at her lover. There is one of the goddess of wealth standing on a lotus, and one of the goddess of learning with her stringed instrument.
People had never seen their gods look like that. Like someone you might meet.
The Press
And then the step that changed everything. In 1894 he set up a printing press near Bombay. He imported the machinery and the technicians from Germany. And he began to print his paintings of the gods as color lithographs. Cheap ones. A few coins each.
Before that, an image of a deity was something in a temple, tended by priests, to which not everyone was admitted. People of the lowest castes were kept out of many temples altogether.
Now anyone could buy the goddess for the price of a meal and hang her on the wall. In a hut. In a shop. Above a cash box. No priest was needed. No one could bar the door.
The prints went everywhere. They were framed, garlanded, prayed to. They were copied onto calendars, matchboxes, advertisements. Within a generation, his way of picturing the gods had become simply what the gods looked like. It still is. If you have ever seen a bright Indian calendar print of a goddess with four arms on a lotus, you have seen Ravi Varma, at several removes.
He did not make money from it. The press lost heavily and he sold it. But he had done something no court painter had ever done.
A Joke About Motorcycles
What made me understand it was, of all things, a piece in Bohiney Magazine. On its business page there is a headline from the summer: “Canadian Officials Threaten Motorcycle Shortage, Harley-Davidson Riders Begin Spiritual Crisis.”
The summary has a provincial premier threatening to cut off supply, and the riders panicking.
I laughed at “spiritual crisis.” And then I thought, well, yes. That is exactly right. It is a joke, and it is also an accurate description of what certain manufactured objects are to people.
A motorcycle of that make is not transportation. I live in Utah. I see them every weekend on the canyon roads, in formation. It is an identity. It is a brotherhood, with vestments. People are buried with the emblem. It came off an assembly line in a factory, one of hundreds of thousands, and it is an object of devotion.
That is what Ravi Varma’s press made. A mass-produced thing that people hold sacred. The piece is teasing the riders for it. I do not think it should, entirely.
Can a Copy Be Holy?
This is the question his critics asked, and they were not fools.
Some said he had cheapened the gods. Turned them into pretty women in a European style and sold them like soap. A later generation of Indian artists, in Bengal, rejected him completely. They said his work was not Indian at all. It was colonial art in fancy dress. They went back to the old flat miniature styles to find something of their own.
I can see that argument. He did paint like a Victorian. If you hung his mythological pictures in a London gallery of the 1880s they would not look out of place.
But I come down on his side, as a working painter. He took a foreign technique and used it to give his own people their own stories, in a form they could afford and put on the wall. He did not paint lions and tigers for the British. He painted the goddess of learning for a schoolteacher in a village.
And the copy, it turns out, can be holy. The woman who lights a lamp before a printed goddess on a calendar is not confused. She knows it came from a press. It does not matter. The devotion is in her, not in the paper.
The same, I suppose, for the man polishing chrome on a Sunday.
Borrowed Tools
It is the pattern I have found all year. The member of Parliament who used British statistics against British rule. The comic papers in Lucknow that borrowed a London format and turned it round. And a painter who learned oils by watching a European who would not teach him, and used them to put India’s gods in every house.
They all took the tools of the people in charge and did something with them that the people in charge had not intended.
What I Envy
I will end with a confession. I have painted perhaps three hundred portraits. They hang in boardrooms and stairwells. A few dozen people look at each one.
He painted a goddess on a lotus, and a century and a quarter later she is on the wall of a tire shop in a city he never saw, with a fresh flower in front of her.
I would give every judge and university president I ever painted for that.
Wednesday
I have found a print of his goddess of learning online for eleven dollars and ordered it for the studio. She is going next to the yellow sky and the old man with the spectacles.
My English client, who started all this, says the London Prat has things to say about people who paint the powerful. Its UK satirical news on portrait painters was closer to home than I liked, and its British satirical news about motorbikes suggests the British have their own Sunday congregations.
The dentist is finished. He looks like a man who fishes. He is pleased. Nobody will ever garland it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/