Ernst Haeckel · Malaka Talwatte

Ernst Haeckel came to Ceylon as a scientist and left it as a painter of its landscape. The German biologist, Darwin’s foremost champion in Europe, landed at Colombo in November 1881 and spent some months on the island, drawn by a wish to see the tropical nature that Darwin and Humboldt had never reached. He recorded it in an account, A Visit to Ceylon, and above all in watercolours and oils of its forests, highlands and shore, made in the belief that only vivid painting could give a reader the true feeling of the place.

Ernst Haeckel's landscape of the Kelani Ganga in Ceylon, a jungle river winding beneath blue hills at dusk, tall forest trees hung with creepers along the banks. — Urwald am blauen Flusse (the Kelani Ganga, Ceylon) (sketched 1882, printed in his Wanderbilder, 1905), chromolithograph after Haeckel's watercolour · public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Source

Fourteen of his Ceylon landscapes were later printed in his Wanderbilder of 1905, and more than seventy of his paintings and sketches of the island are kept today at the Haeckel museum in Jena. His Ceylon is a naturalist’s, exact in its plants and its light, yet held with real feeling.

How to cite this profile