Modern and Pre-Modern Artists

Pre-modern (13)

The British artists, soldiers, officials and travellers who recorded the island through the nineteenth century, before a modern art of Ceylon existed.

• Samuel Daniell

  (1775–1811)

  Samuel Daniell came of the most distinguished family of topographical painters in Britain.

  1 publication

• Captain John Deschamps

  (fl. 1828–1845)

  Where Lyttleton had drawn the royal interior, Captain John Deschamps kept to the western coast.

  1 publication

• Thomas Fraser

  (1776–1823)

  One of Ceylon's great spectacles was the kraal, the driving of wild elephants into a timber stockade, and it reached print through the exact eye of a military engineer.

• Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming

  (1837–1924)

  Known to her intimates as 'Eka', Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming was the twelfth child of a Scottish baronet and largely self-taught.

• James Miller Huggins

  (1807–1870)

  Whether James Miller Huggins ever reached Ceylon is not recorded, yet his *View in Ceylon with Soldiers and Natives on a Road* of 1854 hangs today in the Government Art Collection.

• Thomas Hampson Jones

  (1846–1916)

  Beneath a great rock face in the hill country of Uva stands the Dhowa Rock Temple, a Buddhist shrine known for a tall standing Buddha cut in low relief into the living rock.

• Edward Lear

  (1812–1888)

  Poet, painter and author of the *Book of Nonsense*, Edward Lear landed at Colombo in November 1874, aged sixty-two, during a fourteen-month journey through India at the Viceroy's invitation.

• Lieutenant William Thomas Lyttleton

  (c.1786–1839)

  With the 73rd Regiment, Lieutenant William Thomas Lyttleton reached Ceylon in October 1814, the year before the Kandyan kingdom fell, and remained seven years.

• Andrew Nicholl

  (1804–1886)

  Andrew Nicholl of Belfast came out in 1846 as the first teacher of painting at the Colombo Academy, and in Emerson Tennent, a fellow Belfast man born the same year, found the patron who would shape his Ceylon work.

  1 publication

• Captain Charles O'Brien

  (d. 1866)

  When Emerson Tennent's *Ceylon* appeared in 1859 to considerable success, its descriptions of the hill country, the coffee districts and the remote interior outran the illustrations the book could provide.

  1 publication

• Henry Salt

  (1780–1827)

  Henry Salt was the first professionally trained British artist to draw Ceylon from life, arriving in 1802 as secretary and draughtsman to Viscount Valentia on a grand tour of the East.

  1 publication

• James Stephanoff

  (c.1787–1874)

  James Stephanoff, Historical Painter in Watercolours to King William IV, never set foot in Ceylon.

  1 publication

• Charles Freegrove Winzer

  (d. 1940)

  Into this environment came Charles Freegrove Winzer. Appointed Inspector of Art by the colonial government in 1920, an Education Department role supporting the subject in schools, he brought with him not only formal training in Paris but direct personal acquaintance with the leading modernists of the age.

  1 publication