The Kizhakke Palat Krishna Menon & Family

A painting by Raja Ravi Varma, one of India’s nine National Treasure artists, is always a headline act but this oil on canvas is even more special because it is the first commissioned painting that marked the artist’s transition as a professional. It is a historic work also because of the seminal position Varma enjoys in the history of modern Indian art—in that sense, it is the first milestone in India’s modernist art history. The painting consists of five members of the illustrious family and can be decoded for the details the artist has carefully observed and painted in a manner that would mark his domination of Indian art pratice in the nineteenth-twentieth centuries.