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Eyck developed the palette for oil colours by mixing pigments with linseed and various nut oils, and over time this technique was experimented upon and re-developed by many artists that followed, particularly those of the Renaissance period. The versatile nature of oil paint, where it allowed the artist to employ a thick, impasto effect, and render minute, descriptive details on to the canvas as well, made it highly suited for the Realism style of painting. The play of light, shadow, colour, texture, and form came together in extraordinary ways to produce a wealth of art. In fact, the Dutch American abstract expressionist artist Willem de Kooning was known to have said: “Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented.” The interplay of oil paints, likened to “butter” by many, was impossible to resist. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci refined the medium to include “studies in perspective, proportion and human anatomy”. (“Oil Paint: The History and Development of a Medium”, arthistory.net) Oil paintings on canvas continued well into the Impressionist period, with Claude Monet, and beyond into Modernism, with Wassily Kandinsky, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.
In India, Raja Ravi Varma was the best known artist for his work with the oil painting medium in the latter half of the 19th century. Oils were brought to India by European colonizers, artists mostly, who preferred a style called “easel painting”, which was a painting that was mobile and could still be hung on walls. At the same time, “European painters also brought to India yet another novelty which had already dominated Western art since the fifteenth century—academic realism—whereby the principles of perspective, foreshortening and highlight were applied in order to create works that evoked the visual reality of life,” according to art historian Rupika Chawla, in the book Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India. While these weren’t particularly revolutionary methods or styles of painting in the history of Indian art, they definitely shed a new light on it, one which Varma was inclined to adopt.
Mythological texts like Mahabharata and Ramayana informed his work, often mingling with scenes of domestic Indian life, in a highly romantic fashion. In the 1860s, Varma was introduced to the fairly inaccessible Winsor & Newton oil paints by his brother-in-law, and it “pushed him a step further towards his maturity as an artist,” says Chawla. Sari-clad women were a dominant motif in his canvas, as were regal and stately portraits of royalty and aristocrats, coming together in a fusion of Indian and European aesthetics.
Oil painting took a hit during the Independence movement, when artists from the Bengal School of Art, like Abanindranath and Gaganendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, and others, chose to eschew the academic realism style of European art for an older Indian aesthetic, replacing oils with the water-based pigments popular during the earlier style of miniature painting.
Yet, post independence, and with the Modernist movement striving to form a new voice to represent India and its changing socio-political landscapes, artists like F.N. Souza, M.F. Husain, and Ram Kumar worked with the medium. Souza’s work, in particular, was characteristically dark, provocative and satirical in style and form, elements that were possibly conveyed all the more powerfully and with nuance through the medium of oils.
On StoryLTD, we have a number of oil paintings on canvas, paper and other mixed media, ranging from carefully detailed portraits to soulful abstracts that show the medium’s growth and inherent playful quality in contemporary Indian art.