Jatayu Vadh (The Slaying of Jatayu)

Raja Ravi Varma painted this work in 1895, at the height of his influence as the first Indian artist to master oil on canvas within the European academic realist tradition. Born in Kilimanoor, Kerala, in 1848, Varma was largely self-taught, studying European engravings and later working alongside the Dutch-trained painter Theodore Jensen, whose advice on portraiture sharpened Varma's handling of skin tone and drapery. By the 1890s he had won the Madras and Bombay art exhibitions, received royal patronage from the Baroda and Travancore courts, and established the Ravi Varma Fine Arts Lithographic Press at Lonavala, which would ultimately carry his compositions to millions of Indian households as oleographs. His mythological canvases (drawn almost entirely from the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavata Purana) were revolutionary precisely because they gave Sanskrit literature's characters living, particularized faces and bodies rather than the stylized forms of the earlier Rajput and Pahari miniature traditions. Jatayu Vadh is among the most kinetically composed of those works: unlike his more serene devotional panels, it is organized around diagonal thrust and counterthrust, the rising sword arm opposing the plunging bird in a structure that owes something to European Baroque history painting. The work is held in the collection of the Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad, and has been widely reproduced in studies of nineteenth-century Indian modernity.