Ravi Varma Press Oleograph

The Ravi Varma Press was the chromolithography press founded to reproduce the paintings of the Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma, 1848 to 1906, whose work fused European academic painting technique with Indian subject matter and iconography. Ravi Varma's decision to make affordable lithographic reproductions of his own paintings, mostly depicting Hindu deities and scenes from the Indian epics and Puranas, gave the wider Indian public unprecedented access to fine-art style religious imagery and helped define popular Hindu devotional visual taste for generations. The press's oleograph prints, produced from the 1890s into the early twentieth century, circulated far beyond what any single painted original could reach, and set a visual template many later devotional print studios continued to follow.