Stanley Abeysinghe

In a studio at the Government College of Fine Arts in Colombo, the teacher stands at the far side of the easel while a student paints, and says very little. Stanley Abeysinghe held that position through most of the 1950s and 1960s, and the generation of Sri Lankan painters who came up after independence was shaped, in no small part, in rooms he ran. His is the name that tends to fall out of the story, because a teacher’s work survives inside other people’s canvases rather than under his own signature.

He was born on 26 January 1914. He came up through the Art Department of the Ceylon Technical College and was teaching there by 1942; in 1949 a government scholarship took him to London, to the Central School of Art and then St Martin’s, and in 1951 he spent a year at the British Museum, studying the collections at close hand before returning to Colombo.

What he brought back was a way of painting that answered the question the whole movement was asking. His grasp of the classical Sinhalese tradition, the line of the temple mural and the fresco, sat alongside a working knowledge of the modern European experiments, and out of the two he made a sober, essentialised portraiture: limited in palette, quiet in incident, the forms pared back to what the face required. Two oils of 1945, ‘Birth of Laksmi’ and ‘Samsaraprashnaya’, predate the London years and already point that way; his one-man exhibition in Colombo that same year struck the younger artists as a revelation and helped set the modern movement in motion, and a contemporary critic named him the artist-cousin of the English painter Matthew Smith. Later he painted a life-size portrait of the first Prime Minister, D.S. Senanayake, and it is in that measured, unshowy register that his own hand is clearest.

The teaching was the larger vocation. He rejoined the Technical College as an assistant lecturer in 1952, moved to the Government College of Fine Arts in 1953, and served as its Principal from 1965 until he retired in 1969. It was there, in the studios he ran, that he introduced modern art to the students of the College. Sushila Fernando is said to have studied under him in Colombo before she went on to St Martin’s; Walter Kalasooriya was among his pupils; through the College passed much of the cohort that took Sri Lankan art forward from the ’43 Group. The University of Kelaniya conferred an honorary doctorate in fine arts, and a UNESCO fellowship carried him to Britain, the United States and Japan. Beyond the studio he worked on the Arts Council’s drama panel and on stage productions, so that his influence reached past painting into the cultural life of the new nation.

He died on 5 April 1995, though some sources place his death two years earlier, in 1993. The clearest measure of the man is indirect: it is legible in the way a whole generation of Sri Lankan painters learned to see, in the classroom he kept on the far side of the easel.