Richard Gabriel

On the wall of a church in Thimbirigasyaya, angels play oriental instruments, their music silent and their maker gone. Richard Gabriel painted them, one commission among the many he made for Catholic churches across the island, and they are a fair emblem of the man: a modern painter who kept faith, in both senses of that phrase, for the better part of a century. He was the youngest of the founders of the ’43 Group in Colombo in 1943, and when he died on 19 February 2016, on his ninety-second birthday, he was the last of them left.

He was born on 19 February 1924 and schooled at St Peter’s College in Colombo. His work first hung in public in that same founding year, at the wartime picture exhibition of 1943, where the teenager carried off several prizes, and the older painters gathered around Lionel Wendt took him in as their junior member. In 1952 a British Council scholarship sent him to the Chelsea School of Art in London; after a falling-out with a tutor he is said to have left to work under the painter Peter de Francia, who opened to him the techniques of Chagall and the School of Paris.

Where Keyt reached for Sanskrit lovers and Ivan Peries for the low shoreline, Gabriel turned to the common life and the Christian story. He worked in several hands at once: linocut and woodcut, etching, sculpture in wood, and the wall murals that occupied him for decades. For the Stations of the Cross he cut an etching series bound in only thirty-three copies, and he carved an eight-foot ‘Risen Christ’ in sandalwood. He made too a notable series of black-and-white woodcuts, work that places him among the early figures of original printmaking in Sri Lanka. His subjects were the village, the labourer and the sacred scene, rendered with the flattened, structural clarity the Group had drawn from Sigiriya and from Europe together.

The record reaches beyond the island. Gabriel exhibited in Britain and France in 1952 and 1953, and his work is said to have travelled to the Venice and São Paulo Biennales in the years that followed; sources place a piece in the permanent collection of the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris, and the Michelangelo Academy of Florence made him an honorary member for his printmaking. He taught as well, at St Joseph’s College and at the Cora Abraham art school, handing on what he knew.

In 2002 he left Colombo for Melbourne, where he lived out his last years, still the bridge between the first modernists and the artists who came after them. He had entered the Group as a boy of nineteen and outlived every colleague who convened it; the angels on the Thimbirigasyaya wall keep playing, a modern hand set to the service of an old devotion.