A Raja Ravi Varma Painting Just Broke All Records

Raja Ravi Varma is one of those artists whose influence is so deeply baked into Indian visual culture that most people don't even realise they've been looking at his work their whole lives. Born in Kerala, largely self-taught, he studied Dutch and Italian masters through prints and figured out how to transplant that European academic technique onto Indian mythological subjects — gods, epics, portraiture — in a way nobody had done before.

This was the man who set up a lithograph presses in India and started mass-producing affordable prints of his paintings, sending them into ordinary Indian homes across the subcontinent. The way Hindu gods look in calendars, posters, and framed prints hanging in living rooms and temples, that visual language is almost entirely Varma's invention. He essentially designed the face of the divine for an entire civilization.

And now, on the eve of April 1st, a room full of collectors witnessed seven minutes of intense bidding that ended up with Varma’s painting, Yashoda and Krishna, a canvas from the 1890s that had been sitting in a private Delhi collection, becoming the most expensive piece of modern Indian art ever sold at an auction.

It was sold for ₹167.2 crore (roughly $17.9 million) at the Saffronart auction in Mumbai.

The painting, initially estimated to go for ₹80–120 crore, sold for more than double the lower estimate. The buyer, unsurprisingly, was Dr. Cyrus S. Poonawalla, founder of the Serum Institute of India. "I am privileged to have the opportunity to acquire, preserve, and care for this iconic painting," Poonawalla said in a statement. "This national treasure deserves to be made available for public viewing periodically, and it will be my endeavour to facilitate this going forward."

The Painting

Yashoda and Krishna was painted in the 1890s, when Varma was at the height of his career. The oil on canvas depicts Yashoda milking a cow, with the infant Krishna approaching her for milk — a scene drawn from a specific stanza in the tenth book of the Shrimad Bhagavatam. Writer and collector Ganesh Shivaswamy, in the Saffronart catalogue, describes it as capturing the exact moment Yashoda, busy churning butter, is interrupted by the infant god seeking her attention.

Varma painted it in his characteristic realist style, using chiaroscuro — the technique of contrasting light and shadow — that he absorbed from European academic painting and applied to Indian mythological subject matter.

The Records It Broke

To understand how big this is, here's where Yashoda and Krishna sits in the list of the most expensive Indian paintings ever sold at auction:

Before this week, the record belonged to M.F. Husain's Untitled (Gram Yatra) — a 14-foot, 13-panel epic from 1954 depicting rural India — which sold for ₹118 crore at Christie's New York in March 2025. That painting had a wild story: Husain completed it, it left India almost immediately, spent 70 years hanging in an Oslo hospital after being bequeathed by the doctor who bought it, and then resurfaced at auction with the proceeds going toward medical training.

Before Husain, it was Amrita Sher-Gil's The Storyteller at ₹61.8 crore (2023). Then S.H. Raza's Gestation at ₹51.75 crore (2023). V.S. Gaitonde's luminous Untitled (1971) at ₹42 crore, which sold for nearly three times its estimate. Tyeb Mehta's Trussed Bull at ₹32 crore in 2021. Another Varma, Radha in the Moonlight, at ₹23 crore back in 2016.

The arc is unmistakable. Indian art, particularly works of genuine historical weight, has been accruing value at a pace that the market is only now beginning to properly price in.

"Untitled (Gram Yatra)" by M.F. HusainChristie's

Why It Matters

Indian art has spent decades being treated as a secondary market — interesting, culturally significant, but not quite in the same conversation as Western blue-chip art when it comes to serious money. A painting selling for ₹167.2 crore at an Indian auction house, bought by an Indian collector who plans to share it publicly, changes that framing. The market is finally saying what the culture has known for a long time.

Minal Vazirani, President and Co-founder of Saffronart, said the sale "sets a new benchmark as the highest-value work of Indian art ever sold" and called it "a powerful reminder of the enduring cultural and emotional resonance of Indian art."

Varma painted Yashoda and Krishna over 130 years ago. On April 1st, 2025, it became the most expensive piece of modern Indian art the world has ever seen.