John Varley the Younger

John Varley the Younger (1850–1933), grandson of the eminent watercolourist John Varley and heir to a distinguished artistic dynasty, addressed himself to the light upon water rather than to monuments. Throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s he painted the island’s lakes and waterways in oil, ‘Beire Lake’ of 1881 and Early Morning Lake Colombo of about 1891, works soft and atmospheric, aligned with the later Victorian concern for light and mood rather than with topographical record.

The dynasty he came from was among the most closely knit in British watercolour: his grandfather John Varley, who lived from 1778 to 1842, was a founding member of the Society of Painters in Water Colours and a teacher whose pupils shaped a generation of landscape drawing. The younger John Varley kept the family craft while turning it outward, becoming a travelling painter who sought his subjects far from England, in Egypt, India, Japan and Ceylon, and working in oil as readily as in watercolour.

His Eastern scenes carried well beyond the exhibition wall, reproduced in books and on postcards by the London publishers Raphael Tuck and Sons, so that his view of Ceylon reached a wide popular audience. His connection with the island was a lasting one: a watercolour of the lake at Sigiriya was shown at the Ceylon Society of Arts exhibition as late as 1928, and his work is today represented in British public collections recorded on Art UK. He died in 1933.