William de Alwis Seneviratne

William de Alwis Seneviratne turned the family’s brush from plants to insects. Born in 1842, the son of Harmanis de Alwis Seneviratne, the botanical draughtsman of the Peradeniya gardens, he grew up in a household where drawing from nature was the family trade, and he carried it into a field of his own. With his brother George he set out to picture the Lepidoptera of the island, its butterflies and moths, working from living and freshly taken specimens so that the colour and the poise of the creature survived on the page; in all they recorded more than three hundred and fifty species, many shown at several stages of life and beside the plants that fed them.

The work came by official commission. On the recommendation of George Thwaites, the director of the botanic gardens at Peradeniya, the Governor, Sir William Gregory, engaged the brothers to record the butterflies and moths of Ceylon; William began the portfolio in 1874 and completed it in 1878. The drawings became a lasting reference for the entomology of the island, their exactness serving its naturalists for generations, and the de Alwis drawings are today held at the Natural History Museum in London.

He was at once artist and naturalist, and he brought to the island’s insects the same patient hand his father had brought to its plants. The dynasty that Harmanis founded ran on through him, and the drawings the brothers made stand among the first sustained records of the island’s butterflies and moths set down by a Ceylonese hand, made for a public that would otherwise never have seen them.

Sources

1. Wikipedia. ‘William de Alwis.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_de_Alwis
2. The Sunday Times (Sri Lanka). ‘A Family Famed for Botanical Illustration, Now Forgotten.’ 11 June 2023. https://www.sundaytimes.lk/230611/plus/a-family-famed-for-botanical-illustration-now-forgotten-522085.html
3. Natural History Museum, London.