J.D.A. Perera

The institution that trains a large share of Sri Lanka’s artists today can be traced to a house on Horton Place, Colombo, where in 1949 J.D.A. Perera opened a government art school and became its first principal. He is remembered less for any single canvas than for the ground he cleared: the portrait painter who gave the state its first settled structure for teaching art, and whose name the JDA Perera Gallery in Colombo still carries.

He was born in 1897 at Pahalagama, in Gampaha, and schooled at Wesley and Ananda Colleges in Colombo before training in art at the Ceylon Technical College under A. E. Bartlem, where he stayed on as an instructor. In 1945 he was appointed Director of the Technical College, and in the later 1940s a government scholarship took him to the Royal College of Art in London, the formal European training that his own students would later receive at home.

During those European years he exhibited widely: at the Paris Salon, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Scottish Academy, the National Art Society of England and the Leicester Galleries. He worked chiefly as a portraitist in oil, and his surviving canvases, among them Card Players of 1950, hold the measured, closely observed manner of the academic portrait tradition he had studied. He belonged, by temperament and training, to the salon generation that preceded the modernist break of the ’43 Group; his lasting mark, though, was made less on the canvas than in the classroom.

The art school he founded in Colombo took formal shape as the Government College of Fine Arts and, in time, the National Institute of Arts; it is the direct ancestor of today’s University of the Visual and Performing Arts, and through it passed generations of Sri Lankan painters and teachers. He set up a Sinhala department so that art could be taught in the students’ own language, recruiting local teachers and craftsmen as instructors, and so widened a training that had until then been conducted largely in English and along European lines. In that decision, as much as in any portrait, lies the reach of his influence.

He retired in 1956 and died in 1967. The gallery that bears his name remains one of the country’s principal exhibition spaces, its permanent collection opening, fittingly, with the founder himself. The house on Horton Place has long since been absorbed into a larger institution, but the shape he gave to art education in Ceylon, a state school open to local languages and local hands, held after him.