There is a moment in the history of Indian visual culture that changed everything - not in a temple, not in a royal court, but in a printing press. When Raja Ravi Varma established the Ravi Varma Lithographic Press in Mumbai in 1894, with the encouragement and patronage of Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda, he did something no Indian artist had done before him on such scale: he democratised the sacred. The gods - luminous, voluptuous, painterly - left the palace and the temple and arrived in the home of every Indian who could afford a print.
The oleograph was born. And Indian visual culture was never the same again.
What is an Oleograph?
An oleograph - also called a chromolithograph - is a multi-color art print produced through the process of lithography, pioneered in the 1830s and entering wide commercial use from the 1860s onward. Depending on the number of colors, a single oleograph could take months to produce, requiring layers of painstaking color registration by highly skilled workers. The finest examples have a richness and depth that, in good condition, can be startling - a warmth of tone and surface that no digital reproduction has ever fully captured.
The Ravi Varma Lithographic Press operated from Mumbai before moving to Malavli near Lonavala, then to Karla in Maharashtra, before being sold in 1901 to its German technician, Mr. Schleizer. It was soon destroyed in a fire and eventually closed - a brief, brilliant chapter that nonetheless seeded something permanent. The images it produced became embedded in the devotional and domestic visual landscape of India for generations.
Raja Ravi Varma: The Artist Who Made the Gods Visible
To understand the oleograph is to understand Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) - the Kerala-born painter who synthesised European academic realism with Indian iconographic tradition and produced, in doing so, the most widely recognised and deeply beloved visual language for the Hindu divine that the modern era has known.
Before Ravi Varma, the gods of the Indian pantheon were rendered according to strict iconographic conventions - formal, symbolic, sacred but remote. Ravi Varma gave them bodies. He gave them faces drawn from the living people around him - women of South India, courtiers, aristocrats - and placed those faces in the mythological narratives of the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Puranas. The result was both revolutionary and immediately recognisable: gods who looked human, stories that felt present, a sacred imagery that was intimate in a way temple art had never quite been.
The oleographs made this vision available to everyone. For the first time in Indian history, a household of modest means could hang Lakshmi or Saraswati, Sita or Krishna, on the wall of their home - printed to a quality that carried the warmth and detail of paint. It was nothing less than the first democratisation of Indian sacred imagery.
The Collector's Perspective: Why Oleographs Matter Now
The serious collector has always known what the broader market is now discovering: that a fine original Ravi Varma Press oleograph in good condition is a rare and genuinely significant object. The press ran for only a handful of years. The prints were used - hung on walls, handled, exposed to light and humidity and the daily accidents of domestic life over more than a century. Examples in excellent condition, particularly the larger formats and the rarer subjects, are increasingly difficult to find.
This is the precise context in which the oleograph collection at Arzaani must be understood. These are not reproductions. They are original press prints - objects with age, with history, with the particular materiality of something made by hand in a process that no longer exists. They carry provenance not only of artist and subject but of medium, moment and survival.
Beyond Ravi Varma, the oleograph tradition extended to other significant artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Other Oleographs collection at Arzaani includes works from this broader tradition - chromolithographs that carried Indian sacred and narrative imagery through the presses of the era, each bearing the particular beauty of the multi-layered printing process at its most accomplished.
For the design-conscious collector, the aesthetic of the vintage Indian oleograph is also powerfully current. The warm, saturated palette - cadmium reds, deep greens, the particular luminosity of a well-preserved print - reads as both historical document and compelling object, equally at home in a gallery-hung study, a curated entry hall, or a deeply personal bedroom wall. Framed with precision and care, a Ravi Varma oleograph commands a room with the quiet authority of something that has been looked at, loved and survived.
The Dakhin | Dilli Connection
Within the curatorial framework of Dakhin | Dilli - A Sacred Dialogue, the oleograph occupies a special position. It is the tradition that carried the visual vocabulary of Indian sacred art into the domestic sphere most completely - that made the temple portable, the myth personal, the divine domestic. In the conversation between North and South that the exhibition traces, the oleograph is both document and participant: a form that synthesised regional sacred traditions into a single, universally accessible visual language.
To acquire an oleograph from Dakhin | Dilli is to hold a piece of that history in your hands.
The Collection at Arzaani: Raja Ravi Varma Oleographs
Mohini - Among the most celebrated of all Ravi Varma subjects. The enchantress in her full, luminous power. A rare and commanding acquisition.
Arjun and Subhadra - The Mahabharata's great love story rendered in the painterly warmth that defines the master's touch.
Ganga Avtaran - The descent of the sacred river, one of Hinduism's most dramatic cosmological narratives, given Ravi Varma's characteristic human intimacy.
Shiva Pariwar - The divine family of Shiva, rendered with the compositional authority of European academic painting and the iconographic depth of the Indian tradition.
Mayurrudh Saraswati - The goddess of wisdom and music on her peacock mount, graceful and resplendent.
Ganesh with Ridhi Sidhi - The remover of obstacles flanked by his consorts, a deeply auspicious subject of enduring domestic devotion.
Sita in Van - Sita in exile, a subject of quiet, heartbreaking beauty - among Ravi Varma's most emotionally resonant treatments.
Gulbakavali - A subject of exquisite feminine grace, characteristic of Ravi Varma's celebrated ability to render the ideal human form.
Woman Holding a Fan (Rare) - A rare secular subject from the master's hand - the studied, dignified beauty that defined an era.
Krisna Bandhan Mukti (Rare) - Krishna's liberation from bondage, a rare and theologically charged subject.
Ritu Raj Madalsa - Seasonal beauty personified, in Ravi Varma's most lyrical register.
Sri Bal Subramanium - The young Kartikeya, rendered with the warmth that characterises the master's treatment of divine childhood.
The Collection at Arzaani: Other Oleographs
Radha Rukmani - Two of Krishna's most beloved consorts, rendered in the rich chromolithographic palette of the tradition.
Shree Venkateswara - The presiding deity of Tirupati in oleographic form - a bridge between South Indian temple culture and North Indian domestic devotion.
Damyanti Rani Side Profile and Damyanti with Sakhi and Damyanti Rani - Three treatments of the celebrated heroine of the Nala-Damyanti narrative, each offering a different register of feminine grace and mythic dignity.
Ram Rajya Abhishek - The coronation of Rama, charged with the full weight of dharmic ideal and political myth.
Princes of India - A rare secular subject of considerable historical and documentary significance.
Shiva Parwati as Kirat Bhilli - The divine pair in their hunter and huntress disguise - a mythologically rich and compositionally unusual subject.
Lakshmi - The goddess of abundance in her most iconic form.
Ram Darbar - The court of Rama, one of the most beloved devotional compositions in the entire tradition.
To Collect an Oleograph is to Hold a Revolution
The Ravi Varma oleograph was not merely a print. It was a cultural event - the moment when Indian sacred imagery became the possession of the many rather than the few, when the divine came down from the temple wall and arrived, warm and familiar, in the home. To hold an original press print today is to hold a piece of that extraordinary moment - and to continue, in the privacy of your own space, the relationship between image and devotion that it inaugurated.
Available at Arzaani Atelier Privé, Bikaner House, New Delhi.
Open daily, 11am–7pm.
Browse at arzaani.in/collections/raja-ravi-varma-oleographs and arzaani.in/collections/other-oleographs
