In 1874, a young painter from a palace in Kilimanoor sat down to paint a Tamil woman playing a swarbat. It looks, at first glance, like a simple portrait. It wasn't. Raja Ravi Varma was quietly doing something no Indian artist had done before at this scale: painting Indian subjects with the oil-on-canvas realism of European academic art — and in doing so, he changed what Indian art could look like.

Varma was born in 1848 at the Kilimanoor Palace near Trivandrum, into a family with royal ties, and died in 1906 at 58. Today, a single one of his large history paintings can sell for more than €15 million at auction — among the highest prices ever paid for an Indian painting.

But the record price isn't really the story. The story is what he did with the technique. Varma took Hindu mythology — Shakuntala, the goddesses, the epics every Indian household already knew — and rendered it with the light, shadow, and anatomical precision of a European portrait painter. It hadn't been done before, not like this. He was one of the first Indian artists to fully adopt oil painting, at a time when it was seen as a foreign, imported medium.

Then he did something more radical than the paintings themselves: he opened a lithographic press and started printing cheap, mass-produced reproductions of his religious paintings. Suddenly, a farmer's household could own the same image of Saraswati or Lakshmi that hung in a maharaja's palace. He became, as one art historian put it, “the creator of the common man's gods and goddesses” — the reason so many of us grew up with a very specific mental image of what these deities look like, whether we know his name or not.

That's the tension that makes Varma endlessly interesting more than a century later: a court painter whose most democratic act was making devotional art affordable to everyone, using a European technique to fix an Indian visual identity so firmly that it's still with us. Scholars still argue about what was gained and what was flattened in that translation. We think that argument is worth having — which is part of why we wanted to give him more than a caption's worth of space.

This is the fuller story behind our post on @indiacontemporary.art — part of our Masters series on the Indian painters whose work now belongs to everyone.