Around the same period, she painted other portraits of the movement's leading figures, including Henry Steel Olcott and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. These representations departed from the academic portraiture in which Fuller had trained, as she incorporated practices of intuition and visualisation "inspired by Indian aesthetics as mediated by the Theosophical Society". In 1907, Besant became the president of the Theosophical Society globally, and set to work with a major expansion of the organisation's headquarters at Adyar, in what was then Madras. When it was announced that Besant would undertake a speaking tour of Australia in 1908, she was expected to stay with Fuller while in Perth. Some months later in 1908, Fuller left Western Australia and travelled to India, staying at Adyar. Of her time in India, Fuller wrote:I went in search not only of beauty, and light, and colour, and the picturesqueness in general, which delight the eye and emotions of all artists—but of something deeper—something less easily expressed. I spent two and a half years in a community that is quite unique—perhaps the most cosmopolitan settlement in the world—the headquarters of the Theosophical Society ... Well, I painted there, of course, but my art was undergoing a change, and I felt that it could not satisfy me unless it became so much greater. Fuller's time at Adyar was eventful. Leadbeater arrived around the same time as Fuller, and soon afterward he "discovered" the person he believed would become a global teacher and orator, Jiddu Krishnamurti (then in his teens). Leadbetter and others tutored Krishnamurti. Fuller may have taught him photography. She also had a small studio built in the grounds, and painted. Her works from the period include a portrait of Leadbeater and "Portrait of the Lord Buddha". McFarlane emphasises the significance of the latter work, pointing out that it is "strikingly modern" in comparison to all of Fuller's other work, and more radical than compositions created by Grace Cossington Smith and Roland Wakelin, half a decade later. The painting owes much to theosophy's emphasis on seeing the subject "through a psychic, visionary experience". Fuller faced the challenge of reconciling her academic, European artistic training with the spiritual and philosophical priorities of theosophical thought. Her portrait of Leadbeater, painted in 1910, shows her in that transition. Fuller drew on the work of contemporary Indian artists of the Bengal School of Art, and the writings of art historian Ernest Havell and philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy to "find the formal strategies that she needed" to produce the kind of art to which she was committed.