Raja Ravi Varma Painting Sells for $17.9 M., New Auction Record for Indian Art
Raja Ravi Varma’s Yashoda and Krishna (ca. 1890s) sold for $17.9 million at Saffronart in Delhi on April 1, setting a new auction record for an Indian artist. The sale surpassed the previous benchmark of $13.8 million for M.F. Husain’s Untitled (Gram Yatra), sold at Christie’s New York last year, and far exceeded Varma’s prior record of $4.5 million set in 2023. According to Artsy, the buyer was Cyrus Poonawalla, the pharmaceutical billionaire and founder of the Serum Institute of India. The result also highlighted how top-tier Indian art trading is concentrated domestically, in part because national heritage laws restrict key works by Varma and others from leaving India.
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This story was covered in Museums Under Siege, Auctions Breaking Records