Otto Scheinhammer

Otto Scheinhammer was a German painter and sculptor who spent three years in Ceylon between the wars. Born in Munich in 1897, he was brought to the island in 1927 by E. C. de Fonseka, a wealthy Colombo merchant, and stayed until 1930, painting the leading families of the capital. His Ceylon pictures were shown in Munich in 1931, in a room of their own, and were lost soon after in a fire, so that little of the work survives.

He matters to the island’s story less for what remains than for his presence in Colombo in those years. He was among the resident European painters whose example helped shape the young artists who would form the modern movement, Ivan Peries among them.