J.L.K. van Dort

Any account of the visual record of British Ceylon must include J.L.K. Van Dort (1831–1898), a Ceylonese artist who probably received some tuition from Andrew Nicholl at the Colombo Academy in the 1840s and became the finest indigenous illustrator of the colonial period, serving for nearly three decades as local artistic correspondent to The Graphic, The Daily Graphic and the Illustrated London News. In him something of Nicholl’s influence may be traced: the Irish teacher who landed at Colombo in 1846, and the Ceylonese hand that was to produce the most sustained visual chronicle of daily life in British Ceylon that the nineteenth century would yield.

John Leonard Kalenberg van Dort was born in Colombo on 28 July 1831, the eldest of the nine children of Johannes Jacobus van Dort and Petronella Margaretta née Kalenberg, into the settled Dutch Burgher society of the maritime provinces. He was schooled at St Paul’s parochial school in the Pettah and at the Colombo Academy, where the principal, Dr Barcroft Boake, thought him a prodigy; drawing formed no part of the curriculum, so what discipline he acquired came privately, from Nicholl and, it is thought, from the drawing master Philippe Antoine Hippolyte Silvaf. From 1855 he earned his living as a draughtsman in the Surveyor-General’s office, a post that trained the exact, patient hand visible in all his later work. In 1861 he married Cornelia Henrietta Spittel.

He was essentially a man of pen and pencil, working in monochrome, closely crosshatched and shaded, and turning to watercolour only occasionally and to oil more rarely still; his gift was for the crowded human scene, observed with a satirist’s eye that has invited comparison with Rowlandson and Hogarth. He drew for the Ceylon Observer, The Examiner and the comic paper Muniandi, and his hand carried Ceylon into the London press through The Graphic, to which he was taken up after the special correspondents attending Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, on the royal visit of 1870 remarked his facility. His illustrations furnished a series of books that now stand as a record of the age: the law-court characters for A.M. Ferguson’s Souvenirs of Ceylon of 1868, the Lapidarium Zeylanicum of 1877, John Capper’s Old Ceylon of 1878, and the clinical plates for the government report on the parangi disease of 1881.

His documentary labour was considerable. Toward 1888 and 1889 he was commissioned to record the surviving Dutch forts, canals and inscriptions of the island, and forty-nine of those watercolours, gathered as his ‘Reminiscences of the Dutch Occupation’ and painted on a Dutch commission, are today held at the KITLV in Leiden; his series of the costumes of Ceylon is largely at the National Museum of Colombo, and lithographs after his work entered the Royal Collection. In 1893 he supplied eight large decorative panels for the Ceylon court at the Chicago World’s Fair. His last years were passed at a house near the sea at Bambalapitiya that he named Dordrecht, and he worked almost to his death in March 1898, and The Graphic, the London paper he had served so long, carried his obituary on 24 March; two of his children, Grace and Ernest Francis, followed him into art.