A.C.G.S. Amarasekara

In a Colombo studio in the first years of the century, a young painter sits his subject in careful light, builds the likeness in oil the way the European academies taught, and sends it to the Ceylon Society of Arts, where in 1903 it takes first prize. The painter was Abraham Christopher Gregory Sooriyarachchi Amarasekara, and he would go on holding to that discipline for the next eighty years, through a life that spanned a full century and outlasted the modern movement which grew up in opposition to it.

He was born on 2 March 1883 at Dodanduwa, on the southern coast, and his gift was noticed at school at Prince of Wales College and St Thomas’ College. He took the academic tradition as his ground and stayed with it for life: the measured portrait, the religious and historical subject, the finished surface, the fidelity to appearance that the salons of London prized. His paintings were shown at the Royal Academy and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, and in 1939 King George VI made him an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to art in Ceylon; in 1952 he was granted the title of Gate Mudaliyar.

For half a century he was, in effect, the institution of Ceylonese painting. He taught art at St Joseph’s College and Ladies’ College, led the art division of the Technical College, and gave decades of service to the Ceylon Society of Arts as its secretary from 1919, its vice-president from 1926 and its president from 1959. He ran his own Atelier School, and among the pupils who passed through it was Harry Pieris, who would later help to convene the very movement that broke with his teacher’s world.

That break is why his name is now spoken alongside the ’43 Group. Amarasekara held that painting should honour likeness and finish, and through the late 1920s and 1930s he argued the case in the Colombo press against Lionel Wendt, who was making the opposite argument for a modern art of the island. When Wendt and his circle formed the ‘43 Group in 1943, they defined themselves partly against the academic establishment that Amarasekara personified. The story is usually told from the modernists’ side, as a victory; told fairly, it is the meeting of two serious positions, and the elder held his with conviction to the end.

The sheer volume of the work had its cost in the view of later critics. The art historian Albert Dharmasiri judged that Amarasekara’s prolific portraiture declined in time into a polished, photographic realism, fond of detail for its own sake.

He was president of the Society into his eighties, a working painter into old age, and a man of wide enthusiasms who kept a second life as an amateur stage magician. He died on 29 March 1983, weeks past his hundredth birthday.

To understand the ’43 Group, a collector has first to understand what it answered, and much of that answer is Amarasekara: the leading exponent of the academic manner in Ceylon, the standard the moderns measured themselves against, and an accomplished painter in his own right on the terms he chose.