Harry Pieris

The house at 32/4 Barnes Place in Colombo was Harry Pieris’s home until, in 1974, he turned it into a museum. He named it the Sapumal Foundation, after his own childhood nickname, and left it his residence and his collection; it remains the one place, open to the public, where work by all the core artists of the ’43 Group hangs under a single roof. It is a fitting monument to a painter whose gift was, in large part, for holding others together.

He was born on 10 August 1904, the eighth of eleven children of a wealthy landed family. He learned first under the academic realist A. C. G. S. Amarasekera, the very establishment the Group would later define itself against, then read Pali and Sanskrit at Oxford and trained at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington under William Rothenstein, winning its portrait prize in 1926. From 1929, six years in Paris followed, working beside the Russian painter Robert Falk and forming a friendship with Henri Matisse, before a teaching spell at Tagore’s Santiniketan and his return to Ceylon in 1935.

He came home a formidably schooled painter and became, in the Group founded in 1943, its secretary and its steadying centre. His portraits earned him a reputation as one of the finest Asian portraitists of his day working in a European manner, yet his deeper mark was made through teaching. Ivan Peries, who would carry the island’s low shoreline into English exile and rank among the Group’s finest painters, was his pupil, and should be kept distinct from him: Harry Pieris, spelled so, was the teacher; Ivan Peries the student.

For half a century Pieris kept the Group’s flame, organising, encouraging and quietly working, so that when the movement’s energy might have scattered, a centre held. The Sapumal Foundation was the last and largest act of that temperament. Rather than let the modern masters disperse into private hands, he made a public room for them, gathering Keyt, Ivan Peries, Gabriel and the rest where they could be seen together and studied. He bequeathed the house and the collection to the trust he had built.

He died on 14 March 1988. The Barnes Place house he gave away still keeps its doors open, its walls hung with the movement he served more than he advertised; the quiet anchor of the ’43 Group left, as his monument, the room that holds them all.