David Paynter

In the meditation chapel of Trinity College, Kandy, the biblical figures David Paynter painted onto the walls wear the faces and carry the bodies of the island he was raised on. The Good Samaritan, Christ washing his disciples’ feet, the Crucifixion: he set the scenes of a European faith among Ceylonese models, and gave Christ and the biblical figures the island’s own trees and rocks to stand among, in the full academic manner of the schools where he had trained, and made in the process something the island had not seen before. To understand how a painter arrived at that fusion, you go back to a mission house in the hills and to a boy who could draw.

He was born on 5 March 1900 at Almora, in northern India, to a British father and a Sinhalese mother; the family moved to Ceylon in 1904, where his parents opened a Christian mission at Nuwara Eliya. He was schooled at Trinity College, Kandy, and at nineteen won, in open competition against students already trained in the European schools, a five-year scholarship to the Royal Academy in London. He took the Academy’s Gold Medal and the Edward Stott travelling scholarship, which carried him for two years to Italy and to the frescoes that shaped his sense of what wall painting could do.

From 1923 to 1940 his work hung every year in the Royal Academy exhibitions in London, and in 1936 the Wertheim Gallery gave him a one-man show. He had returned to Ceylon in 1925 to begin the Trinity chapel murals that occupied him across a decade, and he painted portraits of the public men of the age, among them Jawaharlal Nehru, whose official portrait he painted in 1954, Mahatma Gandhi and John Kotelawala; much later, in 1968, he executed the murals for the Chapel of the Transfiguration at S. Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia. In his figure painting he turned to the male nude, which he made a vehicle for spiritual beauty. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, and in 1940 he became Director of the College of Fine Arts in Colombo.

When the ’43 Group formed in 1943 to break with salon convention and turn towards modernism, it defined itself in part against the academic tradition Paynter embodied. That opposition has tended to fix him, in later tellings, as the establishment the moderns overthrew. The record argues for a fuller reading: he was among the first Ceylonese to hold a complete Western academic training and to win at the centre of the imperial art world on its own terms, and he spent his working life turning that training towards the faces, the light and the devotion of his own country.

He died in 1975 and was buried at Nuwara Eliya, in the hills where his family’s mission had stood. In the Trinity chapel the murals remain, their Ceylonese Samaritan and Ceylonese Christ still holding the argument he had made with his brush: that the craft of the academy, fully mastered, could be made to speak in an island’s own voice.