Saraswati (oleograph)
A print made long after the painter died.
- Artist
- Raja Ravi Varma
- Date
- c. 1930 (posthumous print after a painting by Ravi Varma, d. 1906)
- Medium
- Chromolithograph on rice paper, 70 × 50 cm
- Where it is
- Ganesh Shivaswamy Foundation, Bengaluru (Hemamalini and Ganesh Shivaswamy collection)
Saraswati sits on a rock by a river, dressed in white with a pink blouse, playing a veena. A peacock stands beside her. The figure follows the Agni Purana, in which she wears white, plays the veena with two arms and holds a rosary and a book in the others.
This sheet is not a painting. It is a colour lithograph from the Ravi Varma Press, printed around 1930, more than twenty years after Ravi Varma’s death in 1906.
He opened a lithographic press at Ghatkopar in Bombay in 1894 and moved it to Malavli near Lonavala in 1899. Its prints of gods and heroines were very popular and went on being printed in thousands long after his death. The business ran into debt, and in 1901 it was sold to its German technician, Fritz Schleicher, who kept printing Ravi Varma’s designs and added work by other artists. The press ran until a fire destroyed it in 1972. Date a Ravi Varma Press print as a print, not by the painting it copies.
