The Southern ateliers

The painting of the southern coast was carried by a handful of hereditary ateliers, the Sittara Paramparava, each a family workshop that passed the craft from master to pupil and took its name from the village it worked out of. Three of them were remembered by name into the twentieth century: the Kadolgalle, the Valitara and the Katuvana lineages, founded, the scholarship holds, by Kadolgalle Uruvitiye Ganithaya, Valitara Himappu and Katuvana Hamuduruwo.

The men of these lineages were craftsmen by caste, not monks. The painter L.T.P. Manjusri, who gave a lifetime to copying the murals, was at pains to correct the old belief that the temple painting was the monks’ own work: the hands that did it belonged, for the most part, to the Navandanna community, the families that also cut the island’s ivory and worked its fine metal, so that a single inherited skill served the shrine wall and the jeweller’s bench alike.

The oldest tie runs back to the hill country. Katuvana Hamuduruwo, with a fellow monk-painter remembered as Vattawe, is said to have trained under the Upcountry master Devaragampola Silvattenne Unnanse before carrying the Central Kandyan manner down to the Matara coast and founding his own line there, so that a thread of descent joins the court painters of Kandy to the makers of the southern wall.

Of the three the Kadolgalle atelier has left the clearest trace on standing walls. Two of its masters, Kadolgalle Maha Sittara and Podda Sittara, are named as the painters of the murals at the Kataluwa Purvarama near Galle, among the finest of the southern maritime region, and the lineage’s hand has been read as well in the murals of the Sudarshanarama at Dodangoda, dated 1881 and 1882.

The southern painters worked in a world the Kandyan masters had not known. Born in coastal districts that had lain for centuries under European rule, Portuguese, then Dutch, and British from 1796, while the Kandyan kingdom of the interior kept its independence until 1815, they drew their models from the printed matter of the colony, the engravings in newspapers, the illustrated books, the labels on imported goods and the cheap printed cards of the day, and set that borrowed imagery, freely and without embarrassment, into the sacred story itself.

The founders themselves survive as little more than names. The record keeps the lineages and their villages, and a work or two that can be tied to them: the Garanduve Mahasittara, remembered for the painting at the Bogahavatta temple; Galupiyadde Babun, set down in a temple’s own library record as the painter of the work of the 1840s at the Jananandarama in Hikkaduwa. Yet the men who began the lines left no dated life; what remains is the atelier, and the wall it painted.

Sources

1. de Zoysa, Asoka, Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka, and Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka. Evolving Traditions of the Buddhist Image House, Part I. Samkathana Research Team, University of Kelaniya.
2. Dissanayaka, G.R. Sittara Kalava. 1984.
3. Mahinda. 2007.
4. Manjusri, L.T.P. Design Elements from Sri Lankan Temple Paintings. 1977.
5. Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art. Broad Campden, 1908.
6. AmazingLanka.
7. Lankapradeepa.