On the Ravi Varma trail

While restoring the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma, Delhi-based art conservator Rupika Chawla became interested in the artist himself. The result was a lavishly illustrated biography Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India. Here she tells Ranvir Shah how she put together the various strands that went into the book

In one way or another, we have all seen knowingly or unknowingly an image of Raja Ravi Varma; either as calendar art, oleographs in our grandmother's homes or in the homes of friends' grandmothers, seen posters and labels based on his paintings or have been lucky enough to see an original at close quarters as they are in museums in Chennai, Thiruvananthapuram, Baroda, Mysore and Delhi to mention a few and among innumerable private collections.

Well researched
Rupika Chawla, Delhi-based art conservator, has launched Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India, a lavish tome with high reproduction quality of the paintings and well researched chapters on the history and background of the artist, his early formative years, his influences, his work across his career and his fine sense of business acumen, not to mention his modern vision in disseminating his own oleographs to create into what has now become a pan-national visual memory of colonial India.

Chawla, who started as a collector of beautiful objects, moved to learning conservation at the National Gallery of Modern Art in an effort to ‘heal and make whole' things of beauty. Her very first project was a Ravi Varma painting in 1983, even though she had seen many of his works earlier.

Full report here Hindu