Raja Ravi Varma

Raja Ravi Varma was an Indian painter widely credited with bringing European academic oil painting technique into wide popular circulation in India through his depictions of Hindu deities and scenes from Sanskrit epics such as the Mahabharata and Ramayana. Trained in Western portraiture and combining it with Indian religious iconography, he produced paintings that were then mass-reproduced as inexpensive color lithographs through a press he established, making his particular visual conception of gods such as Lakshmi and Saraswati familiar in households across the subcontinent. Varma's synthesis of European technique and Indian subject matter shaped the visual imagination of Hindu religious art well into the twentieth century.