Lot 9: Vasantasena

Raja Ravi Varma (1848 - 1906)
Vasantasena
signed 'Ravi Varma' (lower right)
oil on canvas
39 5/8 x 18 in. (99.9 x 45.7 cm.)

Raja Ravi Varma's well-known paintings of Indian mythological figures redefined the popular imagery available to India's masses, a place among the country's great painters. Born into one of the prestigious feudal families in Travancore, then the southernmost kingdom of India, Ravi Varma grew up in Kilimanoor, the small fiefdom belonging to his family. Among his relatives, the pursuit and mastery of warfare had long been replaced by the arts and Varma grew up surrounded by poets, painters, scribes and musicians. The artist's innate artistic skill was first discovered by his uncle, Raja Raja Varma, who happened to notice the charcoal drawings that Ravi Varma scrawled onto the walls of Kilimanoor and his uncle took it upon himself to give the fledgling artist his first lessons in painting. A youth of aristocratic upbringing, Varma's instruction and explorations at the Royal Court of Thiruvanathapuram were furthered as he began to study the court's available books and manuscripts, many which showcased developments in western art. Learning traditional Indian techniques of watercolor and ground pigments from the palace painter Rama Swamy Naidu, Varma sought to master the western technique of oil painting. Oil painting was still uncommon in India and one of the few local artists working with the medium, Ramaswamy Naicker, refused to teach Varma as he rightly viewed him as competition. Eventually, through covert instruction from Naicker's assistant and observation of Theodore Jensen, a Dutch painter from England who was filling portrait commissions in the Palace, Varma began to hone his immense talent with the brush. Familiarizing himself with the concepts of Realism and Naturalism, Varma began to create his three dimensional worlds on flat surfaces, depicting for the first time mythological gods and epics in naturalized settings.

It was in 1893, that Ravi Varma was inspired to bring art to the masses and established the first printing press in India, known as the Ravi Varma Oleographic and Chromolithographic Printing Workshop. To help produce his paintings, Varma employed Fritz Schleischer of Berlin to act as manager of the workshop, a printer highly qualified in reproducing color lithographic printing. Responding to an outbreak of the bubonic plague in Bombay at the turn of the century, the workshop was relocated to a little known hill station called Malavali in the Western Ghats, about eighty miles from the city.

Franz Schleischer paid the first installment of 4,000 rupees towards the purchase of the first print works in 1903, at which stage the firm was renamed The Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Works. About a hundred yards away from the factory, Schleischer built his home on a hillside, married and had twelve children. His children inherited many of Ravi Varma's paintings and this picture, Vasantasena, was part of the family inheritance.

This work, Vasantasena, meaning spring, is most likely the basis for one of Ravi Varma's oleographs reproduced in both an exhibition catalogue edited by R.C. Sharma for the National Museum of New Delhi's exhibition entitled Raja Ravi Varma, New Perspectives, (R.C. Sharma, ed., Raja Ravi Varma, New Perspectives, exh. cat., National Museum, New Delhi, 1993, pg 134) and editors Edwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger's book which publishes the diary of C. Raja Raja Varma (E. Neumayer and C. Schelberger, Raja Ravi Varma: Portrait of an artist, the Diary of C. Raja Raja Varma Oxford, New Delhi, 2005, pp xv and 283).

The Indian female in particular, was a favorite subject for the artist and he often used local Maliyali or Maharashtrian women as the prototype for his works. Casting them as various mythological figures, Varma would endow their likeness with a sense of the sensual careful not to overstep the lines of propriety. Vasantasena, after which this work is titled, refers to both a character of India's 5th century classical play, The Clay Cart, in which Vasantasena is the faithful courtesan, as well a term indicating the season of spring. Varma highlights both of these definitions in this work depicting a beautiful woman in light fluttering robes placed within a landscape which easily resembles the first blossoms of the Spring.