On the walls of an image house at Borella, the life of the Buddha unrolls in a single continuous painting, its scenes six feet three inches high, from the gods of the heavens begging the Bodhisattva to be born to the Lord Buddha lying down for the last time. George Keyt painted it across 1939 and 1940, the foremost modernist the island had produced setting his hand to the oldest story its temples tell. He worked without a preliminary sketch, drawing the whole cycle straight onto the dry plaster in a line of burnt sienna and bringing it to colour after; twenty-four scenes came off his brush at the largest scale he ever drew, and they are widely held as one of his greatest works.
The temple and the family behind it
The wall came to Keyt through his own family. The Gotami Viharaya was itself relatively young: its land had been given in 1900 by Lady Apolonia de Soysa to the monk Dodanduwe Piyaratana Thera, who is credited with founding the first Buddhist school under British rule, and Lady de Soysa was the mother of the statesman Sir James Peiris, president of the Ceylon National Congress and a leader of the movement for constitutional reform.
It was Sir James’s grandson who brought Keyt in. Harold Peiris, an art-lover and social worker who would later help found the Lionel Wendt Art Centre and serve as its life-trustee, had married Keyt’s sister Peggy; and it was that marriage, rather than any temple’s patronage of the new painting, that set a Burgher-born modernist to work on a Buddhist shrine.
The story itself was long familiar to him. Keyt was born into a Dutch Burgher and Christian family, yet his childhood home in Kandy stood beside the Malwatte temple, and the Buddhist and Kandyan life of the hill country was familiar to him from his earliest years. From 1923 he wrote essays and poems for the island’s Buddhist press, among them the essay ‘The Light of the Dhamma’ and the prize poem ‘Arahan’; after he left Trinity College he became a constant visitor at the Malwatte monastery and formed a friendship of nearly twenty years with the scholar-monk and poet Pinnawela Dheerananda, who taught him Sinhala, the Buddhist texts and the lore of the land. He had wished at one point to enter the Sangha, and been gently turned from it. The life of the Buddha was a subject he had lived close to since boyhood.
The making
The shrine-room walls were built new for the murals by the British architect Andrew Boyd, a pioneer of modern building in Ceylon and a friend of Lionel Wendt, who had made a close photographic study of the island’s older architecture. Keyt worked on them as he seldom worked elsewhere, setting down the whole cycle without a preliminary or a finished study, trusting the design to the first stroke; he took no fee, asking only the cost of his paints and his food from the temple’s lay supporters.
He did not carry the doctrine alone. The temple’s resident scholar-monk, the Venerable Telwatte Amarawansa, took him through the episodes of the life one by one, and Keyt worked the Venerable Amarawansa’s likeness into the cycle in acknowledgement. What began as a drawing in line was brought to full colour at the monk’s asking: the burnt-sienna line was thickened and filled with colour, until the surface carried finished paintings and not the drawings they had begun as.
The decorative borders that frame the scenes are the work of another hand, that of L.T.P. Manjusri (1902 to 1982). A Buddhist monk who had trained under the Venerable Amarawansa and given himself to seeking out and copying the temple murals of the island, Manjusri would sit, a few years later, among the founders of the ’43 Group, the circle that set out to give the island a modern art of its own; he gave up his own robes only in 1950. At Borella he painted the surrounds of Keyt’s scenes, and afterwards made the careful copies of the murals by which the work was reproduced and came to be known well beyond the temple.
The story, scene by scene
The cycle runs one panel into the next without division, a single field to be read by walking the wall from the descent of the Bodhisattva to the death of the Buddha.
The sequence begins in the heavens. The Invitation of the Gods shows the deities come to beg the Bodhisattva to take his final birth, their striped and gold-edged robes and long-curved limbs massed against a deep green ground. In Mahamaya’s Dream, Queen Mahamaya, wife of King Suddhodana and mother of the Buddha-to-be, sleeps on her couch as the white elephant of the dream, the sign of his conception, descends towards her, her women gathered close; The Birth of Prince Siddhartha stands Queen Mahamaya in the Lumbini garden, her raised right hand grasping a flowering branch of the sal tree (Shorea robusta); and Ploughing Ceremony turns to the royal ploughing festival, at which the young Prince Siddhartha, left in the shade of a rose-apple tree, is found already seated in meditation, a small haloed figure among the labourers and their oxen.
The years of the palace follow. Art of Warfare shows the young prince trained in the arts of war; Marriage and Married Life carry him to Yasodhara; and Pleasures of the Royal Palace crowds the pleasure house with its musicians and dancers, in the sensuous manner Keyt commanded better than any subject. The turn comes with The Universality of Sorrow amidst Comforts, the palace women fallen asleep in ugly disarray after the night’s dancing, the sight that first turned the prince from the pleasures of the household. The signs that drive him out are given one to a panel: An Old Man in the Pleasure Garden, The Four Great Omens, and The Sight of a Recluse, the aged, the sick, the dead and the calm ascetic set out in turn.
The renunciation takes four scenes of its own. Parting from Yasodhara and Prince Rahula holds the prince over his sleeping wife and newborn son for a last silent look; The Great Renunciation carries him from the city on the white horse Kanthaka, its hooves borne up by the gods so that no sound should wake the guard; Crossing the River Anoma sets horse and rider against ruled diagonals and swirling water; and Becoming a Monk has him cut off his hair and take the robe. Two scenes carry the search that follows: Visit to Rajagaha, the meeting with King Bimbisara, and Bodhisattva meets Alara Kalama, the first of the forest teachers whose meditation the Bodhisattva mastered, then set aside as short of the goal he sought.
The climax is the enlightenment, and Keyt gives it the hottest colour on the wall. Defeat of Mara and Defeat of the Maras throw the demon host at the seated Bodhisattva across grounds of burning red, Mara himself a grotesque of bulging eye and serpent tongue, his daughters and his army flung through the space around; out of that assault comes Enlightenment, the still centre the whole wall has moved towards. The teaching and the end close the sequence: The First Sermon gathers the five ascetics, Kondanna, Bhaddiya, Vappa, Mahanama and Assaji, in the deer park at Benares; Visit to Kapilavasthu brings the Buddha back to the city he had left; and The Passing Away lays the reclining figure down among scrolling gold on the dark ground of the outer wall.
Three of the scenes, the return to Kapilavastu, the first sermon and the death, stand on the outer face of the inner wall, painted larger than the rest and given room to hold the eye alone.
Two traditions in one hand
What Keyt made on those walls was a deliberate marriage of two inheritances. He drew his flat, unshaded figures in long decorative curves, closer to carved relief than to the modelled bodies of European painting, and set them in the stylised order of the old Sinhalese temple wall; behind the drawing lay the classical past of Buddhist Asia, the friezes of Borobudur in Java and the sculpture of Amaravati and Nagarjunakonda in southern India. The bibliographer H.A.I. Goonetileke, who had studied the work closely, judged that Keyt had not left his sources behind him: the conventions of the island’s classical mural, its rigid stylised forms and its flat colour, shaped the manner he arrived at as surely as the Indian tradition and his own lyrical, decorative invention did.
Keyt had reached for the Indian half of that inheritance in person. He first travelled to India in 1939, the very year he began the wall, and returned to it through his life, calling it the ready-made world in which he felt at home; from its temple sculpture at Khajuraho and Konark and the line of its miniature painting he drew the swaying figure and the sharp profile that run through all his later work. The wall at Borella stood in a long line of its own besides. The life of the Buddha had been painted on the island’s walls since Ajanta showed the way in the fifth century, through Hindagala and the Tivanka image house at Polonnaruwa, the eighteenth-century cycles at Dambulla and Degaldoruwa and the nineteenth-century walls of the southern coast, and into the twentieth-century revival that Maligawage Sarlis and Solias Mendis had already begun a few years and a few miles away. Keyt took his place in that line and turned it toward the modern age.
A landmark
The murals were Keyt’s own favourite among his religious works, and the verdict of others has matched his. Anuradha Seneviratna, who wrote the study of them at Keyt’s request and had the painter’s approval of the manuscript months before his death in July 1993, held them the finest religious painting of his life and a turning point for Buddhist art in modern Asia. The George Keyt Foundation, formed in Colombo in 1988, later took on the restoration of the shrine room, so that the cycle still holds where he set it.
The wider world knows Keyt best for the Sanskrit lovers and the cubist line of his easel pictures, and it has not forgotten these: the Venice Biennale of 2024 hung his Nayika of 1943 among the century’s significant painters. Yet the walls at Borella hold something rarer, a modern master setting down the island’s oldest sacred story in a hand that owed as much to the temple as to Paris, and giving the shrine a life it had not worn before.
Sources
- Seneviratna, Anuradha. Gotama Buddha Murals by George Keyt, at the Gotami Vihara, Colombo. Colombo: The George Keyt Foundation, 1993.
- Goonetileke, H.A.I. George Keyt: A Life in Art. Colombo, 1989.
- Goonetileke, H.A.I. George Keyt, Drawings. Colombo, 1990.
- Dharmasiri, Albert. George Keyt ge Gotami Vihara Bitu Sittuvam. Colombo, 1991.
- Khullar, Sonal. ‘George Keyt and the Gotami Vihara Murals.’ Marg, 2017.
- Singh, Devika. ‘George Keyt.’ Biennale Arte 2024. La Biennale di Venezia. https://www.labiennale.org/en/art/2024/portraits/george-keyt
- The Island (Colombo). ‘Perspective of the Moment: Murals at Gotami Viharaya.’ https://island.lk/perspective-of-the-moment-murals-at-gotami-viharaya/
- The Sunday Times (Colombo). ‘Temple Murals That Became George Keyt’s Magnum Opus.’ 15 May 2022. https://www.sundaytimes.lk/220515/plus/temple-murals-that-became-george-keyts-magnum-opus-482443.html
- Ceylon Daily News (Colombo). ‘Gotami Vihara Frescoes.’ Vesak Number, 1950.
How to cite this essay
Malaka Talwatte, “The Life on the Wall: George Keyt at the Gotami Viharaya,” Malaka Talwatte: Sri Lankan Art and Ceylon Antiquaria, https://malakatalwatte.pages.dev/publications/gotami-viharaya-murals/.
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