Somabandu Vidyapathi

Somabandu Vidyapathi carried the temple-mural tradition into the last years of the twentieth century. Born in 1923 at Pannipitiya, into a family of traditional painters, dancers and makers of stage and ritual craft, he went in 1945 to Santiniketan and studied, as several of his countrymen did, under Nandalal Bose. From that grounding he built a manner that joined the classical mural traditions of Asia to the language of the modern movement.

His great work came late. Between 1990 and 1998 he painted the murals of the Bellanwila Raja Maha Vihara, near Colombo, in oil, one of the largest and most admired programmes of Buddhist temple painting the century produced, and enough on its own to found what is now spoken of as a Somabandu tradition. In him the line that runs from the old Sittara through the neo-classic revival of Solias Mendis reaches the present day. He died in 2006.