THE INFLUENCE OF MODERN EUKOPE ON INDIAN ART. 79

Somewhat apart from architecture stands the question
•of Western influence on Indian painting. This influence
has been exerted very largely through the schools of art.
In these schools there is clone much oil and water colour
painting, some of it clever, some extremely poor but all
quite undistinguishable—unless by general weakness of
drawing—from ordinary European work of the same class.
The best-known exponent of this style, though not, I believe,
a school of art pupil, has been the oil-painter Eavi Varma,
whose works, constantly reproduced, are everywhere
popular in India. The i educated' public of modern
India,, having learnt to judge all things by what was
understood to be a "Western standard, misunderstood
the conventional art of India herself ; sincere and tender,
it was often over-formal, and represented in many cases
the decline rather than the zenith of tradition ; and so the
public, seeking for an art easily understood without pre-
paration or effort, welcomed this painter who broke through
traditions and gave them realistic and sentimental pictures
of familiar subjects.

A picture of £ Sita in Exile7 well illustrates the
•difference between Tagore's and Ravi Varma's work. In
the latter's * Sita in the Asoka Grove', we see only a woman
"bullied by her captor ; in the Sita by Tagore we see the
•embodiment of a national ideal. In Ravi Varma's well-
known picture of Sarasvati, again, the lotus-seat—essenti-
ally an abstract symbol of divine and other worldly origin,
is represented as a real flower growing in a lake ; so that
the spectator is led immediately away from the ideal, to
wonder how the stalk can be strong enough to. support a
full-grown woman and why she is not toppled over by the
movements, of the very living elephants behind. I say
4 woman ? advisedly, because Ravi Varma's divinities, in