M. Sarlis

The serene, full-faced Buddha who looks down from the wall of a Sri Lankan home, seated on a lotus in a curtained palace room, is very largely the work of one man. Maligawage Sarlis was the image-maker of the Buddhist revival, and the type he arrived at in the first decades of the twentieth century became the ordinary devotional face of the island’s faith. Born at Ambalangoda in 1880, the son of an astrologer, he studied Pali, Sanskrit and prosody at the Vidyodaya Pirivena at Maligakanda under the great scholar-monk Hikkaduwe Sri Sumangala, and there met Richard Henricus, from whom he took the Western handling of perspective and the painted stage-scenery that Henricus had carried into the temple. Sumangala, who had founded the Vidyodaya Pirivena in 1873, stood among the leaders of the Buddhist revival, a scholar-monk celebrated for the Panadura debate of that year against the Christian missions. He was instructed too by the academic painter A.C.G.S. Amarasekara, whose grounding lay in the European salon manner. Between 1911 and 1920 he painted and modelled the murals and sculpture of the Maligakanda temple in Colombo, the first of many he would paint.

The Buddha he fixed

Sarlis set the older scheme aside. Where the Kandyan shrine had framed its Buddha in a makara arch and drawn him flat and remote, Sarlis seated his in a pillared palace chamber hung with swagged crimson curtains, set a broad and finely worked aureole behind him, and gave him a warm, human face in place of the fixed classical stare. The type he standardised reads as a deliberate new iconography: the robe worn over both shoulders, the right hand lowered in the earth-touching gesture, the figure seated cross-legged in the Burmese fashion, and above the head a tall spiralled cone of flame in place of the low flame of the Kandyan image, a form traced to Thailand. Whether or not every element was his invention, the composite was his, and it held.

His settings came from the theatre and the printed sheet. The backgrounds borrow the soft, tonally graded landscape taught in the colonial art schools, a haze thinning to a distant horizon; the costume and the architecture carry the scene into an idealised, storybook India of the Parsee stage of Bombay and the Tower Hall theatre in Colombo, and above all into the immensely popular colour prints of the Indian painter Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906). Sarlis was among the first to dress the women of the Buddha’s time in something close to a saree, after Ravi Varma, and the mixture of an ancient Indian scripture in the clothes of a Victorian theatre’s idea of the East became, through him, the accepted look of popular Buddhist art.

The print in every home

His lasting reach lay off the temple wall. Seeing that Buddhist households hung imported prints of the British royal family and of European scenes for want of anything of their own, Sarlis took his designs to the Buddhist entrepreneur William Pedris, who had them lithographed in Germany and sold across the island; a Buddhist home could at last hang the birth of Prince Siddhartha or his feat at the archery contest, in Sarlis’s warm and crowded style, on its own walls. In the mid 1920s Pedris and Company issued an illustrated catalogue of the prints, Bauddha Sitiyam Kavya, edited by the novelist Piyadasa Sirisena. The most famous of them, the portrait of the Elder Sivali, was for decades an object of daily devotion, and Sarlis gave the Buddha and Sivali alike a lasting physiognomy that print-designers and temple-builders have copied ever since.

The reach carried him into every popular form. He was the chief artist of the Sinhala newspaper Swadesha Mithraya, a pioneer of the painted Vesak pandal, and a sculptor of portrait statues of the revival’s leaders; the portraits of the Pedris family at the Isipatanaramaya at Timbirigasyaya are attributed to him, worked in the way of the British portraitists. He founded an art college and a correspondence school and illustrated books and newspapers, and in 1939 he began the colossal Buddha at Weherahena, on which he was still at work when he died in 1955.

The reckoning

Later scholarship has judged the work two ways, and the argument between them is the real measure of Sarlis. Albert Dharmasiri saw a low point in the island’s mural tradition: an eclectic art that drew its composition from Mughal painting, its devotional feeling from Italian religious art and the Pre-Raphaelites, and its staging from the Parsee theatre, and that took over the surface of Western painting without its grammar, its colour loud and its finish glassy; and the criticism has force. Against it, de Zoysa sets a case for the defence: that Sarlis, whatever he borrowed, went on to shape the devotional taste of the whole island, gave the Buddha and Sivali their first widely recognised form, and founded the longest-lived tradition of all, alive still in the Vesak pandal, the devotional card and the lit shrine-box. Sarlis himself, in a statement recorded in 1953, explained the compromise plainly: the painters of his day knew the old methods well enough, but had little chance to use them, working instead to the taste of the monks who kept the temples and the wealthy patrons who paid. An art the connoisseur dismisses can be the art a whole people sees, and the face Sarlis gave the Buddha is the one much of the island still keeps.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. de Zoysa, Asoka, Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka, and Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka. Evolving Traditions of the Buddhist Image House, Part I. Samkathana Research Team, University of Kelaniya.
3. Fukuoka Asian Art Museum. Exhibition record for Maligawage Sarlis. https://faam.city.fukuoka.lg.jp/en/exhibition/9441/
4. Sunday Observer. ‘M. Sarlis, the Temple Artist.’ 10 October 2010. https://archives.sundayobserver.lk/2010/10/10/mon17.asp
5. ‘The Birth of Prince Siddhartha Gautama’, Maligawage Sarlis. Google Arts & Culture. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-birth-of-prince-siddhartha-gautama-maligawage-sarlis/oQFmnZeWZ6I1Xg