Kataluwa Purwarama

The Purwarama at Kataluwa, a village inland from the Galle coast, holds the most vivid record of the Transitional Style, and the most startling. Its image house, dated 1886 beneath a British royal crest and a portrait of Queen Victoria, was painted by two named craftsmen of the Sittara tradition, Kadolgalle Maha Siththara and Podda Siththara.

On its walls the sacred Jataka stories share the surface with the colonial world that surrounded them: horse-drawn carriages, Western dress and shoes and jewellery, oil lamps, men at cards and at wine, soldiers carrying guns. Even the temple guardian is shown with a firearm in his hand. Few paintings anywhere set the two worlds, the devotional and the colonial, so frankly side by side, and for that Kataluwa is among the most eloquent things the tradition made as it turned towards the modern age.