Robert Knox

Robert Knox, a sea captain who had passed nineteen years in captivity under the king of Kandy, published upon his return to London An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, a work illustrated with seventeen engravings of a country his countrymen had scarcely begun to imagine. Crude by the standards of the period that followed, and in certain plates silently indebted to Dutch sources without acknowledgement, these images nevertheless inaugurated a tradition of some two centuries’ duration, in the course of which British artists would produce a body of topographical and natural-history work among the finest of the Victorian age.

Remarkable as they are as historical documents, Knox’s engravings are not the work of a trained artist. They were compiled in London from his written descriptions and rough sketches, with additional matter drawn from the account published in 1672 by the Dutch minister Philippus Baldaeus. The frontispiece, a royal portrait, was engraved by Robert White, one of the ablest portrait engravers of Restoration London; the remaining plates, begun by the author’s brother James and left incomplete at his death, were finished by a hand unknown. Seventeen in number, and depicting Kandyan customs and costume, methods of fishing and of agriculture, and an execution by elephant, they represent the earliest British visual record of the island, produced well over a century before the first professional artist observed it.