Raja Ravi Varma's Bombay Press Launched Its First Oleograph, The Birth of Shakuntala, on 12 July 1894, and His Yashoda and Krishna Sold for Rs 167.2 Crore in 2026

On 1 April 2026 a Saffronart auction in Mumbai sold Raja Ravi Varma’s Yashoda and Krishna for Rs 167.20 crore (US$17,978,495), against an estimate of Rs 80 to 120 crore, according to Outlook Business. It is an oil painting of the 1890s showing Yashoda milking a cow while the infant Krishna reaches for a goblet of milk. The painter who made it also opened a printing works in Bombay in 1894, and Open magazine reports that its coloured prints of deities sold for as little as Rs 2.

The record sale of April 2026

Outlook Business reports that the buyer was Dr Cyrus S Poonawalla, managing director of the Serum Institute of India, who said the painting deserves to be shown to the public periodically. The previous auction record for an Indian work, set the year before, was M F Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra) at over Rs 118 crore. ThePrint’s account of the sale carries the same figures.

A Google Arts & Culture feature says the Indian government declared Ravi Varma a National Art Treasure in 1979 and stopped his paintings from being exported. Under the Antiquities and Art Treasures Act of 1972, an art treasure is a work declared by the Central Government by gazette notification, and no one except the Central Government or an agency it authorises may export one.

From Kilimanoor to the Madras prize of 1873

Kerala Tourism gives his dates as 29 April 1848 to 2 October 1906, and places his birth at Kilimanoor, in the aristocracy of the Travancore kingdom. According to the Modernist Journals Project biography, Maharaja Ayilyam Thirunal took him to the Travancore palace at 14, where a palace painter taught him watercolour and the British painter Theodore Jensen later taught him oil. Open magazine adds that Jensen declined to teach him formally and let him watch.

The first documented prize came in 1873. The Modernist Journals Project says he won the first prize at the Madras painting exhibition that year, and a site compiled by one of his descendants says it came with the Governor’s gold medal. ThePrint names the painting as Nair Lady Adorning Her Hair.

Accounts differ on Vienna. One biography, from the Modernist Journals Project, says he became world famous after winning at the 1873 Vienna exhibition. ThePrint gives first prize in its text and a Certificate of Merit in a photo caption of the same painting. Tuput found no Vienna record that names the prize, so this article rests on Madras, the award that several sources agree on.

Chicago in 1893 is also reported two ways. The Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation’s Google Arts & Culture feature says he sent ten paintings to the World’s Columbian Exposition and received two medals and a diploma, while the descendant’s timeline says three gold medals.

Fourteen paintings for a palace in Baroda

The Gaekwad of Baroda, Sayajirao III, commissioned fourteen Puranic paintings for the Durbar Hall of the new Lakshmi Vilas Palace. Scroll.in dates the meeting at Ooty to 1888 and says the subjects were Krishna’s adventures from the Bhagavata Purana and episodes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation dates the order to 1889. Both say the paintings were made at Kilimanoor with help from his brother C. Raja Raja Varma and his sister Mangalabai Thampuratty.

In Scroll.in’s account, Raja Raja Varma was the painter of the landscapes and backdrops in the Puranic works and a lifelong collaborator, and his diary is one of the main sources for the latter part of the painter’s life. Incredible India says the Maharaja Fateh Singh Museum in Vadodara displays Ravi Varma works that the Maharaja commissioned, including mythological scenes and royal portraits. The epic behind many of his subjects is explained in what the Mahabharata is, and the poet of Shakuntala, a heroine he returned to more than once, is in Kalidasa, the poet of Shakuntala.

The press: 12 July 1894

In 1884 T. Madhava Rao, a former Dewan of Travancore, suggested that Ravi Varma have his paintings printed as oleographs in Europe, according to ThePrint’s MAP Academy excerpt and Open magazine. An oleograph is a colour lithograph varnished to look like an oil painting. Nothing came of the idea for about ten years.

In 1894 the Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press opened in Bombay. Open and ThePrint place it at Girgaum, though the descendant’s timeline says Ghatkopar. Open says Raja Raja Varma set it up with the Bombay industrialist Govardhandas Khatau Makhanji, and the Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation says he arranged that partnership. Open puts the starting investment at Rs 50,000; the Shivaswamy Foundation adds that the Maharaja’s Rs 50,000 was not enough to fund it.

The first print was a chromolithograph of The Birth of Shakuntala, made from a painting of about 1890 that the Shivaswamy Foundation now holds. Its catalogue entry dates the print’s launch to 12 July 1894. According to Open it sold for Rs 6, and Laxmi and Saraswati followed at Rs 2 each; ThePrint repeats the figures, citing Open. Each painting, Open adds, needed between seven and 30 lithographic stones.

The German hands behind the colour

A Google Arts & Culture story from the Raja Ravi Varma Heritage Foundation says a German printer, Fritz Schleicher, controlled it technically from the start. He was an expert at drawing figures on stone and set up the steam-driven machines. A second German, P. Gerhardt, transferred pictures to stone and was known for leafy backgrounds. German was the working language of the shop, the story says, as the markings on the stones show, and two machines could produce up to 800 impressions an hour. It calls the press for some time the largest picture-printing establishment in India.

Painters who worked for the press included, in ThePrint’s excerpt, M. V. Dhurandhar, G. V. Venkatesh Rao and Dadasaheb Phalke, whose later work is told in Dadasaheb Phalke and the first Indian film.

Moves, a sale and a fire, with the dates that disagree

The press left Girgaum for Ghatkopar, a Bombay suburb, and then for Malavli near Lonavla. Open and ThePrint give plague in Bombay as a reason. On dates, ThePrint has Ghatkopar in 1898 and Malavli from 1901, the descendant’s timeline has Lonavla in 1899, and the Heritage Foundation says the press was taken apart and rebuilt at least twice between 1898 and 1901.

The Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation dates the sale to Schleicher to 20 July 1901. ThePrint also has 1901, for Rs 25,000, with permission to reproduce more than a hundred of the paintings, while Open says 1903. The Heritage Foundation says Schleicher and a partner, Shriram Pant, leased the press in 1901 and also gives 1903 for his becoming owner. ThePrint says he renamed it F.A.L. Press, Bombay, and added Christmas cards, postcards, advertisements and labels. In Open’s account he held the copyright and used the prints for advertisements and calendars.

Accounts of the end differ. ThePrint’s excerpt and the descendant’s timeline put a fire at the Lonavla works in 1972. Open has a temporary closure after a fire in 1973 and an end in 1980. ThePrint says the press shut in 1975 and that its remaining prints and master stones were auctioned in 2000.

What the prints did, and what critics said

Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology holds a 23-print series, Gods of India, collected by I. H. N. Evans and dated about 1915, each lettered “Ravi Varma Press. Karla Lonavla.” The museum quotes the historian Christopher Pinney as saying the Kali print in the set “clearly has no direct connection with Ravi Varma the artist”. More of the press’s prints are in the Wellcome Collection, whose catalogue says the composition of one, Viswamitra turning away his newborn daughter, served as the model for a panel on a silver water vessel in the Victoria and Albert Museum, as shown by Vidya Dehejia in the Burlington Magazine of October 2022.

JSTOR Daily summarises two scholars. Pinney, in 1997, argued that the press spread Hindu religious and political ideas and that British officials called the new media “print nationalism”. Jacobsen, in 2004, called Ravi Varma the founder of the “God poster industry”.

Critics have been blunt. Some called the work “Bazar art”, the Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation notes. Ananda Coomaraswamy, writing in The New Age on 16 April 1914, called Ravi Varma vulgar, a passage the Modernist Journals Project reproduces.

Where to see the works

The Raja Ravi Varma Art Gallery in Thiruvananthapuram, which Kerala Tourism’s September 2024 newsletter describes as 12,000 square feet beside the Sree Chitra Art Gallery, holds 134 works by him, including 46 paintings, 14 oleographs and 16 pencil sketches, and it also shows works by Raja Raja Varma and Mangalabai. Its hours, the newsletter says, are Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00 am to 4:45 pm, and Kilimanoor Palace donated its oil paintings in 1935, the newsletter adds. The National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, which says it holds 17,039 artworks, names him first among the ten master artists whose works form part of its collection.

Open reports that the C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar Foundation in Chennai holds 130 oleographs.