Ivan Peries

Ivan Peries returned to one stretch of coast for fifty years, and for most of them he painted it from memory, in a house on an English estuary a great distance from the shore itself. The low line of sand and sea at Dehiwela, where he had grown up, was the subject he came back to more than any other, and the distance seemed only to sharpen it. What he made of that line was a held tension between two states of being: a calm, flat, uncluttered picture-space set against the surging movement of sky and cloud and tree, so that a single painting could hold both states at once. He was a painter of feeling rather than of fact, and the feeling he returned to across half a century was the one that only distance teaches: the clearer sight of a place once it can no longer be reached.

The Dehiwela shore

He was born on 31 July 1921 in Dehiwela, then a half-rural suburb on the southern edge of Colombo, the second son of Dr James Francis Peries (1882–1961), a general practitioner who had trained in medicine in Scotland, and Ann Winifred Jayasuriya (1887–1971), a voluntary social worker. The family home, ‘Sihagiri’, was a deep-verandahed house built in 1883 by his grandfather Philip Francis Peries, a businessman, and it stood almost unchanged, its garden luxuriant, until developers pulled it down in 1990. The Peries children grew up among the coconut groves, the spacious bungalow gardens and the beaches of Dehiwela and Mount Lavinia, Ivan closest of all to his elder brother Lester James Peries, who would become the leading figure of Sri Lankan cinema. The two went by bus, and for a while by rickshaw, to St Peter’s College at Bambalapitiya, three miles up the Galle Road.

Academically Ivan was strong, first in his class four times out of five, and his teachers wanted to groom him for the Civil Service. His parents leaned the same way, and his mother was disappointed when he chose painting instead. The choice was made early. His first lessons came at seventeen, under the Royal Academy-trained muralist David Paynter, in whose studio he met and befriended Aubrey Collette; the tutelage was brief, and ended when Paynter closed his atelier and left for India. Little of Paynter shows in the work that followed, but the introduction mattered, because it led, by way of a poster of German art prints and a chain of family conversation, to the two men who would shape him.

Lionel Wendt and Harry Pieris

The photographer, pianist and critic Lionel Wendt was the hinge of the whole modern movement in Ceylon, and it was Wendt who, having seen the boy’s work, told Dr Peries that only two men on the island understood oil paint: Harry Pieris and Justin Daraniyagala. Ivan Peries went to Harry Pieris, and made the right choice for his temperament; he considered him his teacher and his guru, and corresponded with him for the rest of his life. Harry Pieris carried an unusual pedigree, having studied at Santiniketan, the academy Rabindranath Tagore founded, and at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, a genealogy that joined Asia to Europe and tradition to modernity, and that joining lay close to the unstated aim of the ’43 Group itself. As the Group’s Secretary and later as founder of the Sapumal Foundation, Harry Pieris handled Peries’s sales in Colombo for decades, and through the lean years of the exchange controls he braved the bureaucracy to send his old pupil modest remittances from the pictures sold at home. Exchange control had governed the island since the 1950s, restraining the movement of money abroad so that even a small sum sent to London needed official permission.

Wendt bought Peries’s work, recommended him, and opened the wider world of European art to him in reproduction, until his sudden death in December 1944 took from the movement its central figure. Martin Russell, an English intellectual and a cousin of Bertrand Russell, became the third of these early friendships, a major collector who would later set Peries up in London. The influences that ran deepest, though, were internal rather than personal. Writing to his mother from London around 1947, Peries described a canvas in progress whose ‘predominant influences are the Italian primitives and our Ceylon landscape and architecture’, its background ‘rather like Negombo’. That fusion, the quattrocento fresco read through a village on the western coast, is close to the centre of everything he did.

The founding of the ’43 Group

On 29 August 1943 a small company met at Wendt’s house in Guildford Crescent and resolved to form a group: five painters among them Harry Pieris and Ivan Peries, the photographer Wendt, and Lester James Peries, then a writer. Peries was twenty-two, and by the recollection of his colleagues he had done the legwork of bringing the others together, running between Harry, Beling and Wendt to make the connections. Aubrey Collette and Richard Gabriel both remembered it so, and two months before his death Peries himself wrote to Harry Pieris that the ’43 Group had been his ‘brain child’. The Group set itself against the academicism of the Ceylon Society of Arts, and what it achieved was no borrowed European style but the invention of a modern art that was distinctively local, an indigenised modernism of real originality. Peries’s contribution to it was quieter than a manifesto: the coast and its people, held in a still and level light. He taught the younger men too, in his way, and Richard Gabriel, Neville Weereratne and Terry Jonklaas came up as his students. ‘Ivan didn’t really teach as such,’ Gabriel said, ‘but he spoke, and that was enough.’

A breakdown, and an unlikely cure

The year after the Group formed, in 1944, Peries suffered the first of the breakdowns that would recur through his life, later understood as manic depression. One episode has passed into the movement’s lore: he cut the centre out of a portrait of someone he loved, and the young Richard Gabriel afterwards retrieved the canvas and repaired it. Western medicine offered his father, himself a doctor, no hope of a cure, and the social stigma weighed on a middle-class family. In the end his mother, the Roman Catholic wife of a British-trained physician, took him to a Buddhist monk-physician at Nilammahara, where the temple’s care of the mentally ill was well known. Placed on a strict regimen of diet, oils, inhalations and cold baths drawn from the temple well at four each morning, Peries went home, as the monk had predicted, in eighteen days, cured. Fifteen years would pass before a major relapse.

London, and the panel paintings

In 1946 a government scholarship carried him to London, by way of a short stay in Paris, to study at the Anglo-French Institute, a small and short-lived experiment set up in the premises of the old St John’s Wood Art School, where the English painters Adrian Morris and Michael Wishart became lifelong friends. London amounted to a second training, and there he saw at last, in the flesh, the painters he had known only in reproduction: Piero della Francesca, Velázquez, El Greco, Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso. Morris recalled his interest in William Blake as well, and in the English watercolourists John Crome, John Sell Cotman and Samuel Palmer. Alert to the racism of the metropolitan art world, Peries wrote, in his own calligraphic hand, a defence of the claim that African sculpture had been the true source behind Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Out of that new confidence came the ‘panel’ paintings, a sequence of seven very large canvases made between 1946 and 1960: The river (1946–7), The beach (1948), The bathers (1949), The well (1957), The eclipse (1957–8), The arrival (1959–60) and The bathers II (1960). River and beach scenes caught in an unhurried pause between the day’s work and its rest, they drew, as Peries himself suggested, on Sri Lankan and Italian mural painting alike; Lester wrote home that his brother had never made pictures so ambitious, so ‘fresco-like’. The arrival stands as the climax of the series. Its symbolism is legible, reading at one level as Krishna among the gopis, and in it the nervous energy of his early work and the strange mood of his mythological pictures reached their fullest expression.

The storm and the calm

At the heart of his biographers’ reading is a single formal idea, worth stating plainly: across the fifty years it traces a dualism, a dialectic between two opposite states, the flat, quiet, minimally detailed space of sea and shore, and the ‘spirited movement’ of sky, clouds and gardens above it. The movement is, in their words, ‘entirely internal’, the pulse of the place itself rather than any depicted action, and the finest pictures hold the two in a taut equilibrium. A reading offered decades later by documenta 14 describes his work as ‘mythopoeic renderings of the relationship between humans and nature’, a phrase close to what that dualism enacts. The idea can be traced from the seminal Homage to El Greco, painted at nineteen in 1939–40 and repeated in three near-identical versions, to its purest statement in The wave (1955), which his biographers call ‘perhaps his most profound and most perfect painting’, its storm and calm pushed as far as they will go on either side of a point of balance that is itself the picture’s subject. Homage to Lionel Wendt (1945), made in the months after Wendt’s death, had reduced palms and sea to two bare vertical trunks against a grey-blue expanse; yet Peries often said that the real homage to Wendt was The wave.

His range was wider than the landscapes suggest: portraits from James Agate (1938) onward, figure compositions, the ‘mythological’ pictures such as The lovers (1955), abstract collages, and the panoramic panels. An early reviewer coined the word ‘Periesque’ for the quality that binds them, and it holds, because even his most representational scenes reconstruct rather than record. He presents, his biographers write, ‘a world, neither ancient nor modern, clearly recognizable, strangely, hauntingly meaningful and yet ultimately outside the natural experience’. He had invented his own recognisable modern Sri Lankan landscape, and could paint it from an English estuary because it had never been, exactly, a place on any map.

The gesso ground and the landscape of feeling

The paintings of the 1960s carry a new quietness, and with it some of his most exacting craft. Here Peries worked thin paint over a carefully prepared gesso ground, sometimes cracked on purpose like old ceramic so that its grain runs as a counterpoint beneath the surface; in the finest of them, Avatara (1962) and Sudu akase (1963) among them, colour is all but absent and the balance of form is pared to a most precise simplicity. Running alongside these, and their exact opposite in touch, is a body of heavily worked pictures in which impasto and the palette knife bring the movement up to the very top of the surface. Both belong to one sensibility. The Ben Uri Research Unit notes that his style ‘remained as much connected to pre-modern Asian traditions as to European twentieth-century expressionism’, and it is in that light that his art answers to the central requirement of South Asian aesthetic theory, the concept of rasa, the state of mind an aesthetic experience induces; the work is often shaded, too, with the nostalgia of long absence, caught in the recurrent image of a solitary shadowy figure on a beach.

Robed figures, tree-trunks and the sea serve him as the human body or the still life served other painters, a ready frame of reference; and because each picture explores the motif afresh, they never harden, as some of George Keyt’s later work did, into formula pictures. Each is a new variation, not unlike a raga. From about 1966 he added the medium that carried this furthest, a stream of miniature figure paintings in watercolour and water-based acrylic, some produced very quickly and finished by washing the paint away under a tap to leave a delicate image behind. Human emotion and relationship become their theme. His methods stayed meticulous and endlessly experimental throughout, often turning the inferior materials that poverty forced on him to advantage: his own priming of glue and whiting on sailcloth, charcoal drawn into the wet oil, surplus pigment lifted with the knife, glazes laid in the three primaries over several coats, the cracking he judged ‘inevitable but it will not spread’.

Abroad, and the exhibitions

His work had drawn a critic’s notice before the Group existed: a reviewer singled out his Self-portrait in yellow at the Ceylon Society of Arts show of 1940, and at the wartime ‘War Effort’ exhibition of July 1943 he took the first prize, for Manioc and country rice, in a display one reviewer thought ‘virtually a two-man show’ of Peries and Aubrey Collette. He showed in every ’43 Group exhibition from 1943 through 1950 save the one held in 1949, when he was in Europe, and his Homage to Lionel Wendt hung at the third, in March 1945, and again at the Wendt Memorial Exhibition that year. His first one-man show, 125 pictures spanning 1939 to 1951, opened in Colombo in 1951 under the Group’s sponsorship. As the Group carried its work abroad in the 1950s, so did he: to the Imperial Institute in London in 1952, to the Petit Palais in Paris in 1953, where his Iranganie, a portrait of the actress Irangani Serasinghe, was bought for the museum’s collection, to the AIA Gallery’s ‘6 Contemporary Ceylonese Painters’ in 1954, and to the Venice Biennale in 1956 and again in 1958, where his The eclipse was sold.

Through the 1960s the exhibitions continued in Oxford, London and Colombo: ‘Ceylon: A Painter’s Country’ at the South London Art Gallery in 1960, shows at the Bear Lane Gallery in Oxford, at the Queenswood Gallery in Highgate reviewed by George Butcher in The Guardian, and at the Commonwealth Institute, which gave him a large one-man show in 1966, together with retrospectives at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, in 1965 and, with Richard Gabriel, at the Lionel Wendt Gallery in Colombo in 1969. A near-decade of silence followed, broken from 1979 by shows at the Newman Room in Oxford, the Grayshott Art Gallery, and the Galerie Abras in Brussels, and crowned by a retrospective at the Sapumal Foundation in Colombo in 1983. Recognition of the widest kind came only after his death, when he was included in ‘The Other Story: Asian, African and Caribbean Artists in Post-War Britain’ at the Hayward Gallery in 1989, a show the critic Brian Sewell dismissed and Martin Russell rose to defend.

Southend: distance, neglect, recognition

The later life was rooted in England. He had returned to Ceylon in 1950 and lived three years between Dehiwela and Kandy, painting the Haloluwa landscapes in oil on brown paper, before going back to Britain for good in 1953. In April 1955 he married Veronica Perry, whom he had met and painted in London in 1949, and four children followed through the years in Chelsea and Highgate. A major breakdown came after he had painted The arrival, and six months at Friern Barnet followed. In 1963 he moved to 7 Cromer Road in Southend-on-Sea, on the Essex estuary, and there he stayed for his last twenty-five years. He returned to Sri Lanka only once, and briefly, finding that a painter with a large family could not easily begin life there again; in the early 1970s he sold the house he had inherited from his mother, cutting one more tie to the shore he went on painting.

Recognition at home never quite matched the quiet steadiness of the work. The years from 1969 to 1978 were bleak with illness, want and recurrent hospitalisation, and only in his last decade, from 1978, did life ease. In a letter home during those better years, he named the newest work’s echoes precisely: ‘Piero della Francesca, Temple paintings of the 19th century in Sri Lanka, but above all the Japanese print-makers, especially Harunobu.’ The lifelong conversation between the Italian primitives and the island’s own tradition had simply widened to take in Edo.

The Leaning Tree, and the return of the shore

The last great work was serial. Mostly in 1982 Peries made more than twenty large oil-on-board pictures of two trees on a low rolling rise, a narrow upright tree at the right and a leaning, forked tree at the left, the pair splitting each canvas between a curving band of ground below and a squared block of sky above. The ‘Leaning tree’ series gathers a lifetime’s preoccupation with landscape and feeling into a single sustained meditation, to be read whole rather than one picture at a time. Beside it he reworked the compositions of his youth, in Wave II (1981) and Wave III (1987), and in Composition (1981) and an Untitled canvas finished weeks before his death.

Ivan Peries died of a heart attack early on the morning of 13 February 1988, in the kitchen of his Southend home, while making himself a cup of tea; he was sixty-six. He had completed Wave III only months before, and it had brought his work full circle, back to The wave, to Homage to Lionel Wendt, and to the beginnings of the ’43 Group. He was mourned in Sri Lanka, and The Times of London, in its obituary, called him one of the country’s leading painters and the most vital force in its post-war art. The market came to him late: in September 2026 his 1957 panel painting The Well, shown at the Venice Biennale in 1958, sold at Christie’s in New York for US$640,000, the highest sum recorded at auction for a Sri Lankan painting and far beyond any price his own work had reached before. His work is held at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Imperial War Museum in London, the latter his Combined Control and Report Centre of 1943, at Pembroke College, Oxford, and at the Sapumal Foundation in Colombo, so that the horizon he carried to Essex is kept, now, on both shores.

---

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Manel Fonseka. Ivan Peries: Paintings 1938–88. Colombo: Tamarind Publications, 1996.
2. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
3. Wikipedia. ‘Ivan Peries.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Peries
4. Grosvenor Gallery, London. ‘Ivan Peries.’ https://www.grosvenorgallery.com/artists/121-ivan-peries/
5. Ginwala, Natasha. ‘Ivan Peries.’ documenta 14. https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/16222/ivan-peries
6. Ben Uri Research Unit. ‘Ivan Peries.’ https://www.buru.org.uk/contributor/ivan-peries
7. Art UK. ‘Ivan Peries (1921–1988).’ https://artuk.org/discover/artists/peries-ivan-19211988
8. Victoria and Albert Museum, ‘Explore the Collections’. https://collections.vam.ac.uk/
9. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
10. Halpé, Ashley. ‘Potent Icons, All Mysterious’. Sunday Times (Colombo).
11. Ismail, Qadri. ‘Ivan Peries and the Outriggers to Association’. Art Sri Lanka.
12. Christie’s, New York. ‘Ivan Peries (1921–1988), The Well.’ South Asian Modern + Contemporary Art, 16 September 2026, lot 585. https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-6598890