M. Sarlis

Maligawage Sarlis was the image-maker of the Buddhist revival. Born at Ambalangoda in 1880, the son of an astrologer, he served his apprenticeship with Richard Henricus and went far beyond him, until his art became the ordinary visual language of Buddhist Ceylon. He painted the murals and sculpture of many temples, beginning with the Maligakanda temple in Colombo, and he made the lithographic prints, litho-printed in Germany for the entrepreneur William Pedris, that hung in what became almost every Buddhist home, shop and vehicle in the island. The most famous of them, the portrait of the Elder Sivali, was for decades an object of daily devotion.

He founded an art college and a correspondence school, illustrated books and newspapers, and is remembered as a pioneer of the painted Vesak pandal. In 1939 he began the colossal Buddha at Weherahena, on which he was still at work when he died in 1955. Later critics have called his art eclectic and derivative, drawn from Mughal composition, Italian religious painting, the Pre-Raphaelites and the Parsi theatre. Its reach is not in doubt: no single artist did more to shape how twentieth-century Sri Lanka pictured its own faith.