A devotional oil painting by 19th-century Indian master Raja Ravi Varma shattered auction records in Mumbai on Wednesday, selling for $17.9 million — more than double its high-end pre-sale estimate — to become the most expensive modern Indian artwork ever sold at auction.
The buyer, according to the Times of India, was Cyrus Poonawala, the industrialist and vaccine magnate. Poonawala signaled he does not intend to keep the work entirely out of public sight. “This national treasure deserves to be made available for public viewing periodically,” he told the newspaper, adding that he would “endeavor to facilitate this.”
The work, “Yashoda and Krishna,” depicts the Hindu deity Krishna alongside his mother as she milks a cow. Painted in the 1890s and classified as a listed national art treasure, it had spent years in a private collection before going under the hammer at Saffronart, the Mumbai-based auction house that handled the sale.
Pre-sale estimates had placed the painting’s value between $8.6 million and $12.9 million. The final hammer price left those figures well behind.
Saffronart described the canvas as among Varma’s most accomplished works, saying it “exemplifies the artist’s unparalleled mastery of oil painting and his pioneering naturalistic portrayal of Indian deities that helped define how modern India imagines its sacred narratives.” The house also confirmed it represents “the highest value work by an Indian artist sold at auction globally.”
Varma, born in 1848, built his reputation by fusing European academic painting techniques with subjects drawn from Hindu mythology and Indian domestic life — an approach that made his imagery widely reproduced and deeply embedded in popular Indian visual culture. Saffronart noted that the sale coincided with a peak period in his output, describing the 1890s as the height of his career.
