Raja Ravi Varma [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raja_Ravi_Varma] is one of the most celebrated and divisive figures in late 19th century / early 20th century Indian art. On one front, he is praised as the first artist of the masses known for his pioneering efforts in marrying Indian artistic vibes and mythology with European techniques. His paintings and lithographs are a commonplace through the length and breadth of India. On the other hand, the palpably naive flavor of realism espoused in his works are widely seen amongst critics as being derivative, bland and too inspired by Western academic constructs for one’s liking. To a savant of the stature of Aurobindo, he was ’the grand debaser of Indian taste and artistic culture’. (Source:https://www.aurobindo.ru/workings/sa/37_01/0102_e.htm) As a response to his growing clout, The Bengal School of Art (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_School_of_Art) emerged as the avant garde nationalistic art-movement that sought to develop a more homegrown hue of art that was philosophically and artistically distinct from the European academic art. It was via this movement that Abanindranath Tagore, (who also happened to be the nephew of Rabindranath Tagore), emerged as a leading figure. Combining the home-grown Moghul and Rajput styles with orientalist sensibilities, he ushered in a sea change in the style of depictions of the human and divine subjects derived out Indian bodies of literature. Some of the most enduring examples of his art-form are depicted in this collage below; (Sourced from https://www.wikiart.org/en/abanindranath-tagore): In this work, I aspire to harness the fast, arbitrary artistic neural style transfer technique of [1], to sample images from Raja Ravi Varma’s body of work and transfer it to the avant garde Bengal school of art style captured in Abanindranath Tagore’s paintings. I used the open-sourced implementation of [1] that is part of the ’Magenta’ project available at [2]. References: [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.06830.pdf [2] https://github.com/tensorflow/magenta/tree/master/magenta/models/arbitrary_image_stylization