Shri Shankara Shiva Family - Chitrashala Press Print (18×24)

Key Features

This magnificent and historically significant composition presents Shri Shankara Shiva - the complete divine family of Shiva, Parvati, and Ganesha - one of the earliest and most celebrated prints from the Chitrashala Steam Press of Pune, founded in 1878 and among the most influential producers of Indian religious oleographs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work is currently in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Gallery 251), a testament to its recognized status as a masterwork of Indian popular sacred art. Shiva and Parvati are depicted as youthful, luminously beautiful, and richly adorned - their gaze directed directly at the viewer in the act of darshan, the sacred seeing that is simultaneously the devotee looking at the divine and the divine looking at the devotee.

The composition has the warm, direct, richly saturated quality distinctive of the Chitrashala Press aesthetic - a more robust and immediately engaging style compared to the painterly refinement of the Calcutta tradition, the colors vivid and declarative, the figures rendered with the direct frontal engagement of a divine family receiving visitors rather than subjects observed from a respectful distance. Ganesha sits prominently in Shiva's lap - elephant-headed, rosy-complexioned, his own crown and garlands in place - the beloved first son whose presence at the center of the family portrait declares the complete, loving, unselfconscious ordinariness of the divine household. Parvati sits to Shiva's right, red-saried and holding her axe, her expression carrying the grounded, present quality of a goddess who is simultaneously the supreme consort of the cosmic lord and a devoted wife with a child in her family's lap. Nandi - the sacred white bull, Shiva's vehicle and most devoted servant - rests in the foreground, his adorned body the final element of the complete sacred household assembled for the devotee's viewing.

The Himalayan backdrop - painted with the staged quality of a Victorian-era photographic studio - is one of the composition's most charming and most historically specific details, the snow peaks of Kailash serving as the divine family's permanent address made visible in the warm, domestic, completely accessible terms of a nineteenth century portrait photograph.

Museum-Grade Poster Details

• Size: 18 × 24 inches
• Paper: 350 GSM archival matte paper
• Print Quality: High-resolution reproduction preserving the rich chromatic palette, jewel and fabric detail, the warm lion throne carvings, and the full luminosity of the original Chitrashala Press oleograph
• Finish: Non-glare museum matte finish
• Ideal For: Shaiva devotees, collectors of Indian sacred press oleographs, home altar and puja spaces, lovers of Indian religious print history, and anyone who wishes to bring this Met Museum-collected masterwork of the divine family into their sacred space

Why You'll Love It

Vibrant, directly devotional, and historically priceless - the Chitrashala Press Shiv Parivar is one of the earliest and most beloved Indian religious oleographs, a work whose direct darshan quality and warm domestic completeness has made it one of the most enduringly loved sacred images in the entire Indian print tradition - and whose presence in the Metropolitan Museum's permanent collection confirms its status as a genuine masterwork of Indian popular sacred art.

Order Now

Bring home Shri Shankara Shiva - the Chitrashala Steam Press's circa 1890-1920 masterwork of Shiva's complete divine family, available as an 18 × 24 inch museum-grade archival print, with framed and unframed options, exclusively at The Soma Store.