Thomas Hampson Jones

Beneath a great rock face in the hill country of Uva stands the Dhowa Rock Temple, a Buddhist shrine known for a tall standing Buddha cut in low relief into the living rock. Thomas Hampson Jones painted it during a tour of the East in 1895 that took in India, Ceylon and Burma, and signed and dated the sheet ’98 at the lower right. The picture here, The Rock Temple, near Bandarawella, belongs to the late-Victorian taste for the picturesque corners of empire, in the fluent, atmospheric watercolour of the travelling painter.