Harry Pieris

The house at 32/4 Barnes Place in Colombo was Harry Pieris’s home. In 1974 he founded within it the Sapumal Foundation, named after his own childhood nickname, the sapu flower that opens only part-way and never in full, and gave the trust his collection, leaving it the house as well at his death; 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 fits him that his legacy should be other painters’ work and not his own, for his gift, above all, was for holding others together.

He was born on 10 August 1904, the eighth of eleven children, and christened Charles Henry Alfred Pieris. He learned first under the academic realist A. C. G. S. Amarasekara, the very establishment the Group would later define itself against, and as a young man moved within that establishment himself, exhibiting with the Ceylon Society of Arts, raising money for it and sitting on its selection committee. At eighteen he won first prize for animal painting at the All-Ceylon Industries Exhibition, then trained at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, which he entered at nineteen, under William Rothenstein, who marked him early for portraiture and wrote in 1927 of his ‘particular promise’ in it. In 1926 the College’s prize for the best portrait went to his study of his uncle Sir James Pieris. From 1929, six years in Paris followed, working beside the Russian painter Robert Falk and moving in the Matisse circle, with the master’s informal criticism, and casting a few tentative sculptures of his own in Paris, before a teaching spell from 1935 at Tagore’s Santiniketan, to which Rothenstein’s introduction had led him. It was there that he came to know the monk-painter L.T.P. Manjusri, whose copies of Ceylon’s temple murals he bought rather than let them stay in India, and whose later journey to study painting in Tibet and Sikkim he helped to fund. He returned to Ceylon in 1938.

He came home a formidably schooled painter and became, in the ’43 Group, its secretary and its steadying centre. His portraits earned him wide regard, yet his deeper mark was made through teaching. His two most illustrious pupils were Ivan Peries, who would carry the island’s low shoreline into his long years in England and rank among the Group’s finest painters, and Richard Gabriel, the youngest of the founders, whom he taught for no fee and who would give much of his long life to the Christian story.

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, it held together. He designed and hung every one of its exhibitions and gave the Group its emblem, the single dot, and he pressed for a national gallery where the island’s painting could be seen together. 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 work of a movement he had served without ever seeking the credit.

The Sapumal Foundation has tended to eclipse the painter, yet Pieris was an artist of real gift in his own right, and his own work deserves its due. He was a portraitist before all else, held by many one of the finest Asian portraitists of his day working in the European manner, a landscapist besides, and, from his Santiniketan years, a maker of black-and-white woodcuts, though the output stayed small across a life given largely to others. What the pictures carry is a quiet, observed art: soft and glowing colour, a careful and deliberate design, and an acute eye for his sitter. The watchfulness that made him so discerning a judge of younger painters served him equally at the easel. His was the restraint of a thoroughly schooled hand: the years at the Royal College under Rothenstein and in Paris beside Robert Falk had settled into a manner that reached for likeness and harmony rather than display. From his Indian years he kept the earth palette of the Ajanta caves, Indian red and yellow ochre, terre-verte, lapis and cerulean. He flattered no one, setting down each face as he honestly saw it.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
3. de Soysa, Rohan. ’The ‘43 Group: Origins, Aims, Activities and Legacy.’ National Trust of Sri Lanka, 29 September 2016. https://thenationaltrust.lk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/The-43-Group.pdf
4. Dissanayake, Ellen. ‘Ceylon’s 43 Group of Painters.’ Arts of Asia, March–April 1986, pp. 61–67.