Captain Charles O'Brien

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. Captain Charles O’Brien, Assistant Surveyor General, had the same wide access to that interior Tennent had enjoyed as Colonial Secretary, and in 1864 he answered the gap: A Series of Fifteen Views of Ceylon Illustrative of Sir J.E. Tennent’s Work, with lithographs by Jonathan Needham, a suite of landscapes conceived expressly as a visual companion to Tennent’s scholarship. His art was placed in the service of another’s book.