Post card :- Ravi Varma Press
Size 12.30x 8.75 CM ( court card)
Print style :- lithographic post card
Year of print :- 1899 non divided back
Artist :- Paul Gerhardt
About:-
Oriental Buildings, Bombay (Mumbai). Designed by Frederick William Stevens (1847-1900), remodelled for the Oriental Life Assurance company from the previous building on this site (the Cathedral High School), 1893-96. Grey stone facings with white stone dressings, and red roof tiles. Standing on a triangular site between D. N. (Dadabhoi Naoroji) Road and M. G. (Mahatma Gandhi) Road, opposite the Flora Fountain and facing the Victoria (Chhatrapati Shivaji) Terminus, this is another of its architect’s much-admired works: “it is an evocative affair with a spiky silhouette of spirelets, turrets and gables,” says Philip Davies. Its outline gets definition from the tall five-storey tower at the junction, with its tiled pyramidal roof topped with fashionable wrought-iron roof cresting, typical of the period; and the steepled towers at the end of the ranges at each side of the triangle. Although this building has to compete for attention with the other grand ones here, especially the Victoria Terminus itself, it is, says Davies, “an excellent climax in the townscape” (177).
About the artist:-
Paul Gerhardt was one of the very first people to produce artist-signed postcards in India. As chief lithographer at the Ravi Varma Press, he arrived in Bombay with the press machinery in the early 1890s. The working language at the Press was German, and lithographers at the time were highly trained technicians and artists. Gerhardt was a painter as well, at times working with the Varma brothers whom he befriended and was admired by (as the younger Varma's diaries record). These postcards, which can be firmly dated to a contract and some of which are signed and dated in 1899, were his own work. Some may date to 1898, and some are not signed but likely from similarities in style and backs to have been drawn and produced by him at the Press.
