J.D.A. Perera

The institution that trains a large share of Sri Lanka’s artists today can be traced to 1949, when J.D.A. Perera founded the Government School of Fine Arts and became its first principal, the art teaching that had grown up at the Ceylon Technical College moving that year to the Heywood premises in Cinnamon Gardens, Colombo. Cinnamon Gardens took its name from the cinnamon plantations the Dutch had worked on that ground, which the British later laid out as the garden suburb of colonial Colombo. 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, where he stayed on as an instructor and came to head its art department. In the later 1940s a government scholarship took him to study 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 Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, the Royal Scottish Academy, the National Art Society of England and the Leicester Galleries, and in London he was a member of the Chelsea Art Club. 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.

The painting that his teaching overshadowed was, at heart, academic portraiture and figure work. His surviving canvases bear it out: ‘Card Players’ of 1950, and ‘Laurette’, a seated woman in a richly patterned dress, her arms raised behind her head against a dark, worked ground, the pose composed and the modelling careful in the salon manner he had learned at the Technical College and refined in London. He painted, as his salon generation did, for likeness and finish, the measured observation of a sitter rather than any break with tradition; and it is the steadiness of that training, more than any single canvas, that he carried into the school he built.

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.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. Tammita-Delgoda, SinhaRaja. George Keyt: The Absence of a Desired Image.