Charles Freegrove Winzer

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. Around 1922 he founded the Ceylon Art Club, providing it with rooms in a working-class district of Colombo. The Club held annual exhibitions explicitly positioned as a counter to what Winzer called the capital CSA’s “artistic standard of picture postcards and plagiarism of Royal Academy catalogues.”