Deldeniya Sittara Naide

Among the masters whose names the Kandyan record keeps is Deldeniya Sittara Naide, remembered as one of the leading traditional painters of the southern school. He carried the craft-name Naide of the Sittara caste, and his hand has been associated with the temple murals of Suriyagoda, in the Kandyan country, though that attribution rests on a thinner thread of evidence than Silvattenne’s and is best held as a strong tradition rather than a settled fact.

What his name marks is real all the same: a painter recalled as an individual, in a craft where most were remembered only by their family and their school.