Subhodarama, Karagampitiya

The Subhodarama temple at Karagampitiya, in the Colombo suburb of Dehiwala, carries some of the most precisely dated work of the Transitional Style. Its preaching hall and the shrine of the first seven weeks were finished in the mid-1890s, and the outer ceilings and wall paintings of the image house were completed in 1897. Along the upper wall runs a long sequence of the Maha Ummagga Jataka, with the Buddhist heavens set across the ceiling panels above.

The manner is exactly the transitional fusion: the dark grounds and narrative registers of the eighteenth-century hill-country tradition, carried in the more realistic, modelled style of the nineteenth-century low country. For the firmness of its dating, the Karagampitiya cycle has long served as a reference point for the whole movement. Its painter is not named.

The colonial world is worked openly into the sacred story here. A Western clock hangs in the palace of Queen Yasodara and the queen wears a European gown; in the war of Mara the demon host that assails the meditating Buddha shoulders Western firearms. Through the Ummagga cycle the low-country hand reaches, unevenly, for the devices of academic realism, a receding perspective and modelled light set against the flat Kandyan register, and the new imported paint runs free, the vivid manufactured blue that Coomaraswamy thought the lesser painters spent without restraint.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. de Zoysa, Asoka, and Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka. Buddhist Image Houses. Colombo: Samkathana Research Team, 2015.
3. de Zoysa, Asoka, Vajira Nalinda Jayathilaka, and Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka. Evolving Traditions of the Buddhist Image House, Part I.