19th Century Views of Ceylon by British Artists

The first Englishman to set down the likeness of Ceylon did so as a captive. Robert Knox, a sea captain who had passed nineteen years in captivity under the king of Kandy, published upon his return to London An Historical Relation of the Island Ceylon, a work illustrated with seventeen engravings of a country his countrymen had scarcely begun to imagine. Crude by the standards of the period that followed, and in certain plates silently indebted to Dutch sources without acknowledgement, these images nevertheless inaugurated a tradition of some two centuries' duration, in the course of which British artists would produce a body of topographical and natural-history work among the finest of the Victorian age.

More than a century separated Knox's book from the first British artist to observe Ceylon at first hand, and the cause was inaccessibility rather than any want of visual interest. From 1640 until 1796 Ceylon was a possession of the Dutch East India Company, whose principal concern was its monopoly of cinnamon, the most lucrative single commodity in the whole of its empire and worth in the region of 2.5 million guilders annually; that interest the Company defended by fortification and by a rigorous pass system which regulated all movement upon the island and excluded every foreign competitor. British shipping traversed Ceylon waters upon the routes to India and China, but no British subject enjoyed liberty of movement ashore. Even after 1796, when Britain assumed the maritime provinces from a Dutch administration weakened by the French occupation of the Netherlands, the Kandyan kingdom of the interior retained its independence and remained effectively closed to Europeans until its conquest in 1815. The prevailing direction of British art, moreover, lay elsewhere: throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century it was oriented towards Italy, towards classical ruins and Roman antiquities and the picturesque conventions of the Grand Tour*, with their preference for the manner of Claude Lorrain**. Only with the closing of the Continent to British travellers by the French Revolutionary Wars after 1793, and the consequent redirection of artistic energy towards the empire, did Ceylon, by then British and accessible, enter the compass of the professional painter. The works that ensued, beginning with the drawings of Henry Salt in 1802 and of Samuel Daniell in 1805, were thus the product of an opening at once sudden and historically determined, rather than of any gradual awakening.

The artists who succeeded Knox were various in kind: soldiers and civil servants, professional painters, women who travelled and worked alone in the interior, and two celebrated artists besides, who depicted Ceylon at second hand, from the drawings and descriptions of others, without ever having visited it. The pages that follow trace that record from its uncertain origins in the seventeenth century to its full development in the late Victorian period, together with the several human connections, some of them unlooked-for, that run through it.

The First British Images: Knox, Cordiner and Salt

Remarkable as they are as historical documents, Knox's engravings are not the work of a trained artist. They were compiled in London from his written descriptions and rough sketches, with additional matter drawn from the account published in 1672 by the Dutch minister Philippus Baldaeus. The frontispiece, a royal portrait, was engraved by Robert White, one of the ablest portrait engravers of Restoration London***; the remaining plates, begun by the author's brother James and left incomplete at his death, were finished by a hand unknown. Seventeen in number, and depicting Kandyan customs and costume, methods of fishing and of agriculture, and an execution by elephant, they represent the earliest British visual record of the island, produced well over a century before the first professional artist observed it.

The first draughtsman to record the island after the coming of British rule was not, however, an Englishman at all. Joseph Eudelin de Jonville, a Frenchman who had entered British employ, accompanied Frederick North, the first British Governor of Ceylon, to the island in 1798, and served as its first Surveyor General from 1800 to 1805. Engaged at the outset to survey the cinnamon lands, he was charged by North to inquire also into the natural history, the customs and the languages of the country; and in the seven years he passed upon the island he measured and mapped, and drew and painted, compiling a substantial French manuscript together with a body of natural-history drawings, among them a series of studies of the hornbill; the drawings were dispatched to London and are preserved today in the British Library. The first hand to draw Ceylon for the new British administration, fittingly, belonged to a Frenchman.

The earliest original drawings executed on Ceylon under British rule by a British artist are the work of a clergyman, the Reverend James Cordiner, chaplain to the British garrison, who arrived in 1800 among the first administrators to follow the assumption of the maritime provinces from the Dutch in 1796. His A Description of Ceylon, published in 1807 with twenty-three aquatint plates, was the first British book on Ceylon to be illustrated from drawings made on the island itself. The plates are the production of a skilled amateur rather than a professional, and disclose the attentive eye of a clergyman in place of the hand of a trained artist; they possess nonetheless the value of the first-hand and the immediate, having been made at the very inception of the island's transformation under British rule.

The first professionally trained British artist to draw Ceylon from life arrived two years afterwards. Henry Salt (1780–1827) came out in 1802 as secretary and draughtsman to George, Viscount Valentia, upon a grand tour of the East, having studied under Joseph Farington and John Hoppner, both Royal Academicians, before his departure. Of the twenty-four aquatints he published in London in 1809, printed in colours and engraved by D. Havell, J. Hill and J. Bluck, but a single plate represents Ceylon, a view of Point de Galle; it exhibits, nonetheless, an authority to which Cordiner's drawings do not attain. Salt was afterwards to become one of the foremost Egyptologists in Britain and Consul-General in Egypt, under whose patronage Abu Simbel was first cleared; yet the Ceylon view, made when he was but twenty-two, already displays the precision of eye and the assurance of hand that were to characterise the whole of his subsequent career.

Samuel Daniell and the Natural History Tradition

The richest legacy left by any artist who visited Ceylon in the early nineteenth century was that of Samuel Daniell (1775–1811), who came of the most distinguished family of topographical painters in Britain. His uncle Thomas Daniell and his brother William, both Royal Academicians, had between them produced Oriental Scenery, the greatest illustrated work upon India of the period, and Samuel was accounted by many the most gifted of the three. He arrived in Ceylon on 14 August 1805 aboard HMS Greyhound, landing at Galle, and was shortly appointed Assistant Secretary to the Board of Revenue and Commerce, and subsequently Ranger of the Woods and Forests, offices affording him an access to the interior, to its jungles, its fauna and its inhabitants, that no other artist of the period could match.

The twelve plates published in 1808 as A Picturesque Illustration of the Scenery, Animals and Native Inhabitants of the Island of Ceylon are among the finest natural-history prints of the Regency****. The animal plates are the most striking: a spotted antelope against brilliant tropical foliage, elephants at a watering hole, a leopard within dense jungle, each drawn with a luminous precision rarely equalled in the medium, the antelope having been judged by Thomas Sutton, the Daniells' biographer, one of the most beautiful ever published. Daniell enjoyed the patronage of Sir Thomas Maitland, Governor of Ceylon; the island he recorded across six years remained very largely unknown to British observers at the time of his death, of malarial fever, at Colombo on 16 December 1811, aged thirty-six. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the Pettah burial ground.

The Soldier-Artists: Lyttleton and Deschamps

The British army brought to Ceylon, as well as its soldiers, a number of gifted amateur draughtsmen, whose work preserves scenes no professional artist recorded: the military stations and remote garrisons, the fortifications of Colombo and Trincomalee, and, above all, the newly conquered Kandyan kingdom, whose royal palaces and temples had never before been seen by British eyes.

Lieutenant William Thomas Lyttleton (c.1786–1839) arrived in October 1814 with the 73rd Regiment and remained seven years. From his originals Edward Orme of London published six hand-coloured aquatint views of Kandy and its environs, engraved by M. Dubourg and advertised for sale in the Ceylon Gazette of 2 October 1819; they depict the King's Palace, the town of Kandy, Balani Mountain and the Ferry of Wattepalogoa. One is held to be the earliest British representation of the Tombs of the Kandyan Kings, which, demolished in 1850, survive in no other record. Two further aquatints after his work appeared in John Davy's Account of the Interior of Ceylon of 1821. Lyttleton's plates constitute the visual frontier of British knowledge of the Kandyan kingdom in the years immediately following the conquest of 1815.

Fourteen years later Captain John Deschamps, an Adjutant in the Royal Artillery, arrived in 1828 and remained in garrison for a decade. His Scenery and Reminiscences of Ceylon, published by Ackermann and Co. in London in 1845, seven years after his departure, comprises twelve hand-coloured lithographs, drawn on stone by J. West Giles and printed by M. and N. Hanhart. He directed his attention to the western coast: to the Fort of Colombo and the Galle Face Esplanade, to Slave Island and the Buddhist temples, to the Ferry at Bentotte and the Rock of Mulkirri. His volume is a soldier's memoir in pictures, exact and affectionate, and everywhere informed by the daily observation of a garrison officer who had spent that decade among the island's people.

Andrew Nicholl and the Visual Legacy of Sir James Emerson Tennent

More threads of this history converge upon Sir James Emerson Tennent (1804–1869) than upon any other figure in British Ceylon art. Colonial Secretary to the government of the island from 1845 to 1850, he was the author of Ceylon: An Account of the Island, Physical, Historical and Topographical, published in 1859. The work, which passed through five editions within its first eight months, was the fullest account of the island that had then appeared in English; and Tennent, determined that it should be illustrated as amply as it was written, selected as his principal illustrator a fellow Irishman, Andrew Nicholl (1804–1886).

Nicholl had come out in 1846 as the first teacher of painting and drawing at the Colombo Academy, the island's first government secondary school, later renamed Royal College, having been appointed at a salary of four hundred pounds per annum. Upon Tennent's arrival the two Belfast men, born in the same year, formed a friendship that was to shape the visual record of the island for a generation. At Tennent's instance Nicholl travelled with him throughout Ceylon, making drawings of all that he observed; upwards of eighty of the resulting engravings appeared in the book, and through it his Ceylon views reached a wider public than those of any other artist of the island.

Nicholl's manner is readily recognised. His Ceylon watercolours are suffused with a tropical palette that the island drew from him, greens and blues and reds of an intensity he had not known in Ireland; and he was accustomed to enclose a landscape within a minutely detailed border of wild flowers set in the immediate foreground, so uniting botanical exactitude and topographical breadth within one composition. Queen Victoria acquired two of his Ceylon watercolours in 1870. His influence extended, furthermore, beyond his own production, for J.L.K. Van Dort, whose training at the Colombo Academy owed something to him, was to become the leading Ceylonese draughtsman of the next generation.

Captain O'Brien and the Illustration of Tennent's Ceylon

Where Nicholl illustrated Tennent's text from within, Captain Charles O'Brien (d. 1866) supplemented it from outside. As Assistant Surveyor General of Ceylon he possessed the same extensive access to the interior that Tennent had enjoyed as Colonial Secretary; and upon the appearance of the book in 1859, and its considerable success, O'Brien recognised that its descriptions of the hill country, the coffee districts and the remote interior had outrun the illustrations Tennent had been able to provide. In 1864 he published A Series of Fifteen Views of Ceylon Illustrative of Sir J.E. Tennent's Work, with lithographs by Jonathan Needham, a suite of landscape views conceived expressly as a visual companion to Tennent's book. The title declares the relation: O'Brien's art was placed in the service of Tennent's scholarship, and the work of the two men together constitutes the most comprehensive visual and literary record of mid-Victorian Ceylon.

Edward Lear: The Greatest Artist Who Never Published

In November 1874 one of the most celebrated figures of Victorian England landed at Colombo. Edward Lear (1812–1888), poet, painter and author of the Book of Nonsense, had come to Ceylon in the course of a fourteen-month journey through India undertaken at the invitation of the Viceroy, Lord Northbrook. He was sixty-two years of age, accompanied by his devoted Albanian attendant Giorgio Kokali, and had long anticipated the island, which he had, as he recorded in his journal, awaited 'for so many years, the end of my landscape painting aspirations'.

The event answered his expectation only in part. He found the island beautiful but the climate oppressive, the rains persistent, and his companion Giorgio gravely ill with dysentery; yet he sketched with his customary and compulsive industry, travelling by mail coach and one-horse trap to the south and to Ratnapura, and by railway from Colombo to Kandy and back, and producing in less than four weeks over seventy drawings and watercolours. Breadfruit and jak trees, coconut prospects, river scenes near Ratnapura with Adam's Peak in the distance, animated roads near Galle, a landscape with two Buddhist monks: the drawings are vivid, immediate and technically assured, and bear the characteristic pencil annotations of colour and texture from which he was accustomed to elaborate finished watercolours in the studio.

At Ratnapura Lear was the guest of Hugh Nevill of the Ceylon Civil Service, the son of his late friend William Nevill; the visit was, he wrote, 'a duty to the memory of dear William and Mary Nevill'. He can hardly have foreseen whom that duty would set him beside. The younger Nevill was one of the most serious British scholars of Ceylon culture then living: across thirty-two years on the island, through a succession of legal appointments from Colombo to Trincomalee to Batticaloa, he formed the greatest private collection of Sinhala palm-leaf manuscripts in existence, 2,227 of them, now preserved in the British Library, and the largest archive of Sinhala manuscripts anywhere beyond Sri Lanka; he edited The Taprobanian: A Dravidian Journal of Oriental Studies in and around Ceylon from 1885 to 1888. That a simple act of remembrance should have lodged England's greatest nonsense poet beneath the roof of so formidable a scholar, at a remote hill station in the interior, is among the more singular footnotes of the island's colonial history.

Lear's Ceylon works were never published. They remained in private portfolios during his lifetime, and some are now preserved in the Houghton Library of Harvard University. That the most accomplished professional artist to visit Ceylon in the nineteenth century should be at the same time among the least known for his Ceylon work is a paradox that the drawings themselves overturn: seen entire, they are far too fine to have remained so little known.

The Women Artists: Gordon-Cumming, North and Cameron

Three women recorded Ceylon in the 1870s. Each reached the island by a different route and worked in a different medium, yet their three stories are closely intertwined.

Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming (1837–1924), known to her intimates as 'Eka', arrived at Colombo in February 1873 at the invitation of the Bishop of Colombo, in whose company she travelled the island. The twelfth child of a Scottish baronet, and largely self-taught, she observed the rule of 'never a day without at least one carefully coloured sketch', commencing her work each morning at five o'clock. Her brother John had managed a coconut plantation at Batticaloa until his death in 1866, and a visit to his grave upon the east coast was among the most personal episodes of her two years upon the island. She returned to Scotland with several hundred works, executed in watercolour and bodycolour heightened with white, a richer and more opaque technique than simple transparent wash; they were exhibited in London, Glasgow and Liverpool to considerable admiration. Her Two Happy Years in Ceylon, published in 1892 with twenty-five plates from her own hand, is at once a travel memoir, a visual record and a reflection upon the human costs of empire. She was a documented friend and influence of Marianne North, whose gallery at Kew she greatly admired.

Marianne North (1830–1890) painted in Ceylon in 1877, towards the conclusion of a two-year journey about the world that had commenced in 1875. She was a botanical artist of a novel kind, who painted plants within their natural surroundings rather than as isolated specimens; this gave her work a context that formal botanical illustration had lacked. Her Ceylon paintings, executed in oil upon paper in the direct and vivid manner she preserved throughout her travels, record the island's flora with an immediacy and an accuracy that have made them significant in scientific no less than in artistic terms. They are displayed today in the gallery she herself designed and endowed at Kew, where 832 of her paintings from throughout the world cover the walls from floor to ceiling.

Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) arrived in Ceylon singularly provisioned, bringing with her, besides the apparatus of her art, a live cow and two coffins, against the possibility that such things should prove unobtainable in the East. She had come in 1875 in the company of her ailing husband Charles Hay Cameron, whose fortunes were bound to the coffee estates of the island. Born in Calcutta and celebrated throughout Britain as the foremost portrait photographer of the Victorian age, she found the island unkind to her work: fewer than thirty of her Ceylon photographs survive, the humid climate having destroyed the greater part of her glass negatives, and the majority of those remaining are portraits of Tamil servants and estate labourers. When Marianne North came to the Cameron house at Kalutara, upon the south-western coast, Cameron, as North recorded in her memoirs, fell 'into a fever of excitement at having a European subject'.

For three days Cameron photographed her, arraying her in flowing cashmere and posing her against a screen of spiky coconut palms in a temperature of ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit. Cameron, as North recorded with characteristic dryness, 'told me to look perfectly natural'. Four of the photographs survive. The most remarkable represents North at her easel upon the verandah of the Kalutara house, a painter recorded by a photographer, and two of the greatest women artists of Victorian Britain contained within a single frame, upon the western coast of an island at the utmost edge of empire. Cameron died in Ceylon on 26 January 1879; her last word is said to have been 'Beautiful.'

The association of these three women, Gordon-Cumming, North and Cameron, is among the most resonant in the whole history of women's art in the Victorian period. Each defied the conventions of her sex and her time, and each travelled independently; and two of them, in the single year 1892, published the principal illustrated accounts of their travels about the world.

Artists Who Depicted Ceylon Without Visiting

Some of the most significant images of Ceylon were produced by artists who never saw it. The demand for such pictures was so strong that two of the most distinguished British painters of the nineteenth century represented the island without ever setting foot upon it, working from the sketches and descriptions of others.

The first was James Stephanoff (c.1787–1874), Historical Painter in Watercolours to King William IV and a contributor to Pyne's History of the Royal Residences. About 1820 he executed an image of rare historical consequence, The Supreme Court of Judicature in the Island of Ceylon, published as a hand-coloured aquatint by Rudolph Ackermann, engraved by J. Bennet, and dedicated to the Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Johnston. Its subject is a moment in the history of law and conscience: the Supreme Court of Judicature at Colombo, where the first native jury in the British empire had sat since 1810, and where the abolition of domestic enslavement was proclaimed in August 1816. Stephanoff had observed none of it, working instead from a sketch dispatched to London by a Sinhalese juror; and the aquatint was afterwards put to a use more extraordinary still, for in the hands of Chief Justice Johnston this depiction of a courtroom the artist had never entered became an instrument in a constitutional contest over the independence of the judiciary, perhaps the most remarkable purpose to which such a print has ever been put. The original is held at the Yale Center for British Art.

The second was Anthony Vandyke Copley Fielding (1787–1855), President of the Society of Painters in Water Colours from 1831 until his death, a gold medallist at the Paris Salon of 1824, and the master of John Ruskin. His views of Ceylon, like his celebrated Benares and the remainder of his foreign subjects, were executed entirely from the sketches and descriptions of others, for he never travelled abroad; his reputation was nonetheless such that his pictures of places he had never seen were eagerly acquired by a British public whose appetite for images of empire far exceeded the capacity of resident artists to satisfy. William Daniell (1769–1837), Royal Academician, brother of Samuel and one of the supreme masters of the aquatint, belongs here for a different reason: it was his hand that engraved and coloured Samuel's 1808 Ceylon plates, with the technical brilliance he had brought to Oriental Scenery, and he too had never seen the island he made so vivid.

Further Witnesses: Simpson, Chevalier, Varley and Van Dort

By the 1870s the artists arriving in Ceylon were reporters and Romantics as much as surveyors. William Simpson (1823–1899), the most widely travelled British watercolourist of the age and special artist to the Illustrated London News, reached the island in the suite of the Prince of Wales, on his tour of India in 1875 and 1876; his rapidly executed field studies, the medium in which he was most fully himself, carried Ceylon to a larger readership than that of any other artist here considered. He was not alone in recording the royal visit: Sydney Prior Hall (1842–1922), special artist to The Graphic, accompanied the same party and depicted the Prince's landing at Colombo and, on 2 December 1875, the elephants and masked dancers of a Perahera rehearsal at Kandy. Nicholas Chevalier (1828–1902), Swiss by descent, Russian by birth and British by adoption, had preceded them, in 1870, with Adam's Peak, Ceylon, in which the sacred mountain ascends from the surrounding jungle and mist in the tradition of European Romantic landscape. The military topographers had measured Ceylon, and the botanists had catalogued it; Chevalier made of it something approaching the sublime.

A decade afterwards John Varley the Younger (1850–1933), grandson of the eminent watercolourist John Varley and heir to a distinguished artistic dynasty, addressed himself to the light upon water rather than to monuments. Throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s he painted the island's lakes and waterways in oil, 'Beire Lake' of 1881 and Early Morning Lake Colombo of about 1891, works soft and atmospheric, aligned with the later Victorian concern for light and mood rather than with topographical record.

The record extends, finally, to the island's own. Any account of the visual record of British Ceylon must include J.L.K. Van Dort (1831–1898), a Ceylonese artist who probably received some tuition from Andrew Nicholl at the Colombo Academy in the 1840s and became the finest indigenous illustrator of the colonial period, serving for nearly three decades as local artistic correspondent to The Graphic, The Daily Graphic and the Illustrated London News. In him something of Nicholl's influence may be traced: the Irish teacher who landed at Colombo in 1846, and the Ceylonese hand that was to produce the most sustained visual chronicle of daily life in British Ceylon that the nineteenth century would yield.

Taken together, the work forms a confluence of overlapping traditions: the natural-history aquatint, the military topographical sketch, the printed plate book, the watercolour field study, the botanical painting and the albumen photograph. It was produced by men whom their duties brought to the island and by women who came of their own accord; by artists of the first rank and by talented amateurs who drew in the intervals of other occupation; by those who passed decades upon the island and by one, Edward Lear, to whom less than four weeks were granted. Two painters, Stephanoff and Copley Fielding, represented Ceylon without ever visiting it; a third, William Daniell, engraved his brother's drawings of a place he had never seen.

What unites a body of work so various is the island itself: its light, its vegetation, its ancient monuments, its people, and the richness it presented to any eye trained to observe. Robert Knox, detained nineteen years within the Kandyan kingdom, was the first British subject to record that richness in words and in images; and the artists who followed him, across two centuries of patronage and colonial ambition, of private obsession and professional duty, raised upon his foundation what no single eye could have achieved: a collective portrait of an island at the moment of its encounter with empire, preserved in watercolour and ink, in aquatint and albumen, and dispersed now among the libraries and galleries of three continents.

* The Grand Tour was the long journey through France and Italy by which a young British gentleman of the eighteenth century completed his education. He set out with a hired tutor, learned French manners in Paris, crossed the Alps to study the classical past and the old masters of Italy, sat for his portrait among the ruins, and came home with pictures and antiquities for the family house.

** Claude Lorrain (c.1600–1682) was the French master of the idealised landscape: harbours and pastoral valleys bathed in the gold of a low sun, framed at either side by tall trees, their small figures dwarfed by the breadth of the scene. His was the serene, luminous manner that set the taste for landscape the Grand Tourist carried home, and that generations of British painters took as the measure of the beautiful.

*** Restoration London was the city of the years after 1660, when Charles II returned from exile and the monarchy was restored after the Commonwealth years. It was a capital rebuilding from plague and the Great Fire, its playhouses reopened, its court resplendent once more, and its men of science gathering in the new Royal Society.

**** The Regency was the decade from 1811 to 1820, when the future George IV ruled as Prince Regent while his father, George III, lay incurably ill. It lent its name to an age of elegance and display: John Nash's terraces, the Brighton Pavilion, the beau monde of St James's, the last war against Napoleon, and a distinctive style in the arts of those years.

The sources consulted for this essay are listed under Sources (page 00).

Notes on the Artists

Henry Salt (1780–1827)

Henry Salt was the first professionally trained British artist to draw Ceylon from life, arriving in 1802 as secretary and draughtsman to Viscount Valentia on a grand tour of the East. He had trained under the Royal Academicians Joseph Farington and John Hoppner, and the discipline shows. Of the twenty-four aquatints he published in 1809, a single plate is of Ceylon, a view of Point de Galle, made when he was but twenty-two, with an authority Cordiner's drawings could not attain. Salt would later become one of the foremost Egyptologists in Britain and Consul-General in Egypt, under whose patronage Abu Simbel was first cleared.

Samuel Daniell (1775–1811)

Samuel Daniell came of the most distinguished family of topographical painters in Britain. His uncle Thomas and his brother William, both Royal Academicians, had produced Oriental Scenery, the greatest illustrated work on India of the period, and many accounted Samuel the most gifted of the three. He reached Ceylon on 14 August 1805 and, as Ranger of the Woods and Forests, gained a freedom of the interior unmatched in his day. His twelve plates of 1808 are among the finest natural-history prints of the Regency: a spotted antelope against brilliant foliage, elephants at a watering hole, a leopard within dense jungle, each drawn with luminous precision.

Lieutenant William Thomas Lyttleton (c.1786–1839)

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.

Captain John Deschamps (fl. 1828–1845)

Where Lyttleton had drawn the royal interior, Captain John Deschamps kept to the western coast. An Adjutant in the Royal Artillery, he arrived in 1828 and served a decade in garrison, and his Scenery and Reminiscences of Ceylon, published in London in 1845, gathers twelve hand-coloured lithographs drawn on stone by J. West Giles: the Fort of Colombo and the Galle Face Esplanade, Slave Island and the Buddhist temples, the Ferry at Bentotte and the Rock of Mulkirri. His is a soldier's memoir in pictures, exact and affectionate: he drew what a garrison officer saw daily among the island's people.

Andrew Nicholl (1804–1886)

Andrew Nicholl of Belfast came out in 1846 as the first teacher of painting at the Colombo Academy, and in Emerson Tennent, a fellow Belfast man born the same year, found the patron who would shape his Ceylon work. Travelling the island at Tennent's side, he supplied upwards of eighty engravings for Tennent's book, and his Ceylon views reached a wider public than those of any other artist of the island. His manner is unmistakable: a tropical palette of greens, blues and reds, and landscapes framed within a minute border of wild flowers, where close botanical detail meets a wide prospect. Queen Victoria acquired two of his watercolours in 1870.

Captain Charles O'Brien (d. 1866)

When Emerson Tennent's Ceylon appeared in 1859 to considerable success, its descriptions of the hill country, the coffee districts and the remote interior outran the illustrations the book could provide. Captain Charles O'Brien, Assistant Surveyor General, had the same wide access to that interior Tennent had enjoyed as Colonial Secretary, and in 1864 he answered the gap: A Series of Fifteen Views of Ceylon Illustrative of Sir J.E. Tennent's Work, with lithographs by Jonathan Needham, a suite of landscapes conceived expressly as a visual companion to Tennent's scholarship. His art was placed in the service of another's book.

Edward Lear (1812–1888)

Poet, painter and author of the Book of Nonsense, Edward Lear landed at Colombo in November 1874, aged sixty-two, during a fourteen-month journey through India at the Viceroy's invitation. He found the island beautiful but the climate oppressive, yet sketched with compulsive industry, producing in under four weeks over seventy drawings and watercolours: breadfruit and jak trees, river scenes near Ratnapura with Adam's Peak beyond, animated roads near Galle. Immediate and technically assured, and bearing his characteristic pencilled notes of colour and texture, his Ceylon works were never published in his lifetime, and rank with the best any artist made of the island.

Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming (1837–1924)

Known to her intimates as 'Eka', Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming was the twelfth child of a Scottish baronet and largely self-taught. She arrived at Colombo in February 1873 at the Bishop of Colombo's invitation, and kept a rule of never a day without at least one carefully coloured sketch, beginning at five each morning. She returned to Scotland with several hundred works in watercolour and bodycolour heightened with white, a richer and more opaque technique than simple wash, and exhibited them in London, Glasgow and Liverpool to considerable admiration. Her Two Happy Years in Ceylon (1892) is at once a travel memoir and a reflection upon empire.

James Stephanoff (c.1787–1874)

James Stephanoff, Historical Painter in Watercolours to King William IV, never set foot in Ceylon. About 1820, working from a sketch sent to London by a Sinhalese juror, he executed The Supreme Court of Judicature in the Island of Ceylon, published as an aquatint by Rudolph Ackermann and dedicated to Chief Justice Sir Alexander Johnston. Its subject is the Colombo court where the first native jury in the British empire had sat since 1810, and where the abolition of domestic slavery was proclaimed in 1816. In Johnston's hands, this picture of a courtroom the artist had never entered became an instrument in a constitutional contest over the independence of the judiciary.

Thomas Fraser (1776–1823)

One of Ceylon's great spectacles was the kraal, the driving of wild elephants into a timber stockade, and it reached print through the exact eye of a military engineer. Thomas Fraser, son of a Morpeth portrait painter, served with the Madras Engineers from 1796 to 1819, rising from Lieutenant to Captain and, by 1803, to Superintending Engineer of Public Works for the Madras Presidency; he was present at the siege of Seringapatam. From his sketches made on the spot, James Robert Thompson drew the aquatint shown here, Method of Catching Wild Elephants by the Kraal in the Island of Ceylon (1817), printed in colours.

James Miller Huggins (1807–1870)

Whether James Miller Huggins ever reached Ceylon is not recorded, yet his View in Ceylon with Soldiers and Natives on a Road of 1854 hangs today in the Government Art Collection. A marine painter and etcher, son of William John Huggins, Marine Painter to William IV, he grew up in Leadenhall Street beside the East India Company's headquarters, trained under his father, and made engravings after his work. He exhibited rarely, four times at the Society of British Artists from 1826 and once at the British Institution in 1842; his marine subjects are now in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.

Thomas Hampson Jones (1846–1916)

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.

Unknown Artists

Not every fine view of nineteenth-century Ceylon carries a signature. Four watercolours here are the work of hands now unrecorded, yet each holds its corner of the island as surely as the named plates around it: a view of Slave Island at Colombo, the British hill fort at Matale, a planter's bungalow above Haputale, and the Temple of the Tooth at Kandy seen from its moat.

Wall Text — Exhibition Entrance

For nearly two hundred years, British artists came to this island and drew what they saw. This is Ceylon through British eyes in the 19th century.

It began with watercolours and drawings, made on the spot. Few in Britain would ever see the island for themselves, and the appetite for images of it was immense. Some of the originals were reproduced for that wider audience as aquatints and lithographs, printed and carefully coloured by hand. Yet some were never published at all, and survive here in the artists' own hand.

Some came here under orders, some out of curiosity or grief. Andrew Nicholl taught at the Colombo Academy, framing his Ceylon views within a fine border of wildflowers; Queen Victoria bought two of them. Edward Lear stayed only a few weeks in 1874, made over seventy drawings with notes on colour, and published not one in his lifetime.

Two artists here never set foot on the island at all, painting Ceylon from sketches sent home by others, a measure of how strong that appetite was.

Together they are a record of the island as it once was: its light, its vegetation, its ancient monuments, some of which no longer stand. These views have long belonged to distant collections, and most have never been shown on the island they portray. Brought together for the first time, they hang here at last.

Welcome Speech

Delivered by the Chairman of the George Keyt Foundation. Westminster House, Residence of the British High Commissioner, Colombo. 30 July 2026.

Your Excellency Andrew Patrick, distinguished guests, good evening.

August 1873. A Scottish woman stands at a graveside in Batticaloa. She has crossed half the world to reach it, not as an official or a missionary, but as a sister. Her brother John came out in 1845, ran a coconut plantation on that coast, and died here in 1866. Years later, she has come to see where he lies.

Her name is Constance Gordon-Cumming. She has brought her sketchbook, as she does everywhere. Even here, to her brother's grave.

She meant to stay a few weeks. She stayed two years. Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. The paddy fields of the low country. The faces of people she met on the road. She went home with several hundred watercolours and a book she illustrated herself.

She was not the only one who overstayed. Her friend Marianne North, the finest botanical painter England produced, arrived two years after Gordon-Cumming left. And while she was here she called on Julia Margaret Cameron at Kalutara. Cameron was so thrilled to have a European sitter that she posed North at her easel on the verandah, wrapped her in draperies, stood her in ninety-six degrees of heat, and told her to look perfectly natural.

That photograph survives. So do North's paintings. So do Cameron's Ceylon portraits, and Gordon-Cumming's watercolours. Three women. Three art forms. One island, and none of them in any hurry to leave.

And almost none of it has ever been seen here.

It hangs in London. In Belfast. In a library at Harvard. For two hundred years this country has been the subject of these pictures and almost never the audience for them. That is what tonight changes. That is why the George Keyt Foundation mounted this exhibition, and why we have insisted, from the beginning, that it be genuinely open.

Open to the public, free, for the duration of the show. A dedicated viewing for writers and members of the press. And time set aside for art history students, from the University of the Visual and Performing Arts and from the History Department of the University of Colombo. They come not to file past the walls, but to spend proper time with the work and learn from it. Pictures locked in private collections teach nobody. These will.

And it will outlast the walls. We have produced a book, a history of the significant artists who came to this island, with nearly two hundred illustrations, including every work hanging here tonight. It is offered at a subsidised price for the run of this exhibition, because we would rather it sat open on a desk than closed behind glass. For researchers, for students, for anyone who wants to go further than one evening allows, it is the reference that did not exist until now.

There is more than these three. Samuel Daniell died at Colombo at thirty-six, buried in an unmarked grave in the Pettah, and left twelve plates as good as anything made in Britain that decade. Edward Lear came for three weeks in 1874, made seventy-one drawings, published not one of them. Andrew Nicholl taught at the Colombo Academy, Royal College today, and Queen Victoria thought his Ceylon paintings good enough to buy two for the Royal Collection.

They were looking at your country. Tonight you get to look back.

My thanks to His Excellency Andrew Patrick, who opened this house to us, the first known public art exhibition ever held at Westminster House. A British High Commission and a Sri Lankan foundation, standing together before two centuries of complicated history and choosing to look at it honestly. That is not a small thing.

My thanks, too, to British Airways, our co-sponsor. And to Nations Trust Bank, Lynear Wealth and the Juniper Group, and to MTV News First, our media partner.

Constance Gordon-Cumming came here to bury a brother and stayed two years because she could not stop looking. Everything on these walls was made by someone with the same affliction.

Ladies and gentlemen, the exhibition is open.

How to cite this essay

Malaka Talwatte, “19th Century Views of Ceylon by British Artists,” Malaka Talwatte: Sri Lankan Art and Ceylon Antiquaria, https://malakatalwatte.pages.dev/publications/19th-century-views-of-ceylon/.

Quote and cite freely with attribution; please do not republish a whole essay, or a photograph, without permission.

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