Raja Ravi Varma — Galaxy of Musicians

Raja Ravi Varma learned European oil painting and turned it on India. Galaxy of Musicians (1889) gathers eleven women from different regions of the subcontinent, each in the dress of her own place, each holding an instrument from it — veena, violin, tanpura, sitar — as though a country could be assembled simply by seating its musicians in one room.

Then he did something with longer consequences than the painting. In 1894 Ravi Varma set up a lithographic press near Bombay and began printing his images by the thousand as cheap oleographs. For the first time, households that would never set foot in a gallery could own a picture and hang it. Art historians still argue about the sentimentality of the results. Nobody argues about the reach.

Make your own galaxy: six colours, out of six places. The painting is a colour chart pretending to be a group portrait — eleven women, eleven regions, eleven sets of cloth that had never before been in one room. Six of its colours are sitting under this entry, sampled out of the canvas itself. Go and gather six of your own, each from somewhere different: a wrapper from a shop, a coin, a cloth, a book you were given, something carried home from a trip, something a person left behind. Lay them in a row on the floor, lightest to darkest, and name each colour in the most specific words you own — not "blue", but the blue of that particular tin. Six names, in order. That is a palette, and you made it out of your own life instead of buying it.