Pieter Cornelis de Bevere · Malaka Talwatte

Pieter Cornelis de Bevere was the first great draughtsman the island produced under European rule, and his name survives on one of the finest bodies of natural-history painting made anywhere in the eighteenth century. A Ceylonese artist of Dutch descent, born about 1733, he was a grandson of Willem Hendrik de Bevere, who had sat on the Colombo Political Council between 1708 and 1714. He was commissioned by Joan Gideon Loten, the naturalist governor of Dutch Ceylon from 1752 to 1757, to record the island’s birds, mammals, fish, insects and plants. Loten, who called him ‘the untaught Christian Cingalese’, found him a little trained in the Surveyor’s office and set him to the work. Between 1754 and 1757 he made some one hundred and forty coloured drawings, exact and beautiful, working from the specimens Loten gathered.

Pieter Cornelis de Bevere's mid-eighteenth-century drawing of Governor J. G. Loten and his company fishing from boats on the Negombo river in Ceylon, a wooded shore behind and elephants at the right. — Governor Loten and his company fishing on the Negombo river, Ceylon (c.1754), pen and wash, drawn on the spot · public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Source

He served the governor to the close of his term and went with him to Batavia in 1757; he had died by 1781. Carried to Europe, his drawings helped make Loten a figure in the scientific world of his day, and they survive now in the Natural History Museum in London, the British Library, and the great Dutch collections at Haarlem and Amsterdam. In him the island’s own hand enters the record of its art two centuries before the modern painters.

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