Mohini

Mohini

c. 1905
Publisher No.: 
829
13.65x
8.65cm

[Original caption] The Goddess of beauty sitting on a swing [end]

This image by Ravi Varma was one of his most successful in calendar art. Shown here she is perfect and ordinary, ideal yet accessible. As Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schellenberger—pioneering Austrian researchers into the Ravi Varma Press— discovered, Mohini was based on photographs of Anjanibai Malpekar, a favourite later muse of Ravi Varma (Raja Ravi Varma, Portrait of an Artist: The Diary of C. Raja Varma, Delhi/Oxford, 2005, p. 255).