Thomas Hampson Jones

Thomas Hampson Jones, known professionally as T. Hampson Jones, was a lesser-known British painter who set out on a tour of the East in 1895, taking in India, Ceylon and Burma. He belongs to the late-Victorian taste for the picturesque corners of the empire, in the fluent, atmospheric watercolour of the travelling painter.

Little of his life is securely documented. His work surfaces chiefly at auction, and there the greater part of it is domestic: harvest fields, and views such as Croxteth and Rhoscolyn on Anglesey, signed watercolours of the 1880s and after. Against that home ground the pictures from his eastern journey stand as the less common part of his output.

The Ceylon subject securely associated with him is ‘The Rock Temple, near Bandarawella’, a watercolour of the Dhowa rock temple, or Dowa Raja Maha Viharaya, which stands on the Badulla to Bandarawela road some seven and a half kilometres north of the town. The temple is known for its unfinished standing Buddha, about eleven metres high, cut into the vertical granite of the rock face, and is held by tradition to date from the reign of King Valagamba in the first century before Christ. Where the record is thin it is left thin here; beyond this, the certain facts of Jones’s career are few.

Sources

1. Talwatte, Malaka. ‘19th Century Views of Ceylon by British Artists’.