Answer- They were copied as oleographs and sold in markets.
Many of Raja Ravi Varma's paintings were copied as oleographs and sold in markets, making them accessible to a broader audience.
The company style of painting declined with the entry of photography in India in the mid–nineteenth century as camera offered a better way of documentation. What, However, flourished in the art schools set up by the British was the academic style of oil painting that used a European medium to depict Indian subject matter. The most successful examples of this type of painting were found away from these art schools. They are best seen in the works produced by self-taught artist, Raja Ravi Varma of the Travancore Court in Kerala. By imitating copies of European paintings popular in Indian palaces, he mastered the style of academic realism and used it to depict scenes from popular epics like the Ramayana and Mahabharata. They became so popular that many of his paintings were copied as oleographs and were sold in market. They even entered people’s homes as calendar images. With the rise of nationalism in India by the end of the nineteenth century, this academic style embraced by Raja Ravi Varma came to be looked down upon as foreign and too western to show Indian myths and history. It is amidst such nationalist thinking that the Bengal School of Art emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century. |
