Kandyan

The paintings of the island's last kingdom, and the first of its artists we can name, worked on temple and shrine walls through the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, for the first time, the makers step out of anonymity. The Sittara, the hereditary painter-craftsmen, and the master-monks who led them, are the earliest Sri Lankan artists whose names the record keeps.

“An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it to time.”

Paul Valéry