Hippolyte Silvaf

Hippolyte Silvaf was among the earliest painters to make a trade of the portrait in Ceylon. A man of French and Indian descent from Pondicherry, he worked on the island around 1840, when the painted likeness was still a rarity here, in oils, in miniature on ivory and in coloured crayon, and set down the types, costumes and faces of its people.

His eye ranged wider than the sitter. His drawings of the fishes of the Ceylon coast were judged by Thomas Huxley among the finest illustrations of tropical fish then made, and three wood engravings after his sketches were printed in Emerson Tennent’s great account of Ceylon in 1859. With the Ceylonese satirist Van Dort, he stands near the beginning of an art of close observation on the island, one that looked at its own life rather than at the picturesque prospect the visitor came to find.