The Sittara

The painters of the Kandyan kingdom worked as a hereditary craft rather than as lone artists, and it is with them that Sri Lankan painting begins to keep names at all. They were the Sittara, temple craftsmen who carried the work down through families, the men taking the craft-name Naide and the master of a workshop the title Mulachari, the head craftsman under whom the assistants painted.

A line of such painters was a paramparawa, a school passed from one generation to the next, and the most celebrated of them was the Nilagama paramparawa. Their surviving work divides into a central Kandyan school around the capital, a provincial school in the country temples, and a southern school along the low country, where masters such as Dingiran Appu of Ahangama and Welitara Heenappu of the Matara district are remembered.

Even here the record is thin, and many are known by their clan rather than their own name. Yet the anonymity of the classical centuries is broken, and for the first time particular hands can be set against particular walls.