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. The king was Rajasinha II, who had seized the crew of the English ship *Anne* at Kottiyar bay in 1660 and held its men, Knox among them, until his escape in 1679. 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 record runs 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.
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How to cite this essay
Malaka Talwatte, “The British Record: Nineteenth-Century Views of Ceylon,” Malaka Talwatte: Sri Lankan Art and Ceylon Antiquaria, https://malakatalwatte.pages.dev/publications/british-record/.
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