Lieutenant William Thomas Lyttleton

With the 73rd Regiment, Lieutenant William Thomas Lyttleton reached Ceylon in October 1814, the year before the Kandyan kingdom fell, and remained seven years. From his drawings Edward Orme of London published six hand-coloured aquatints of Kandy and its environs: the King’s Palace, the town, Balani Mountain, the Ferry of Wattepalogoa. One is held to be the earliest British image of the Tombs of the Kandyan Kings, which, demolished in 1850, survive in no other record. His plates are the visual frontier of British knowledge of the Kandyan interior in the years immediately after the conquest of 1815.