Long before a British artist set up an easel on the island, Ceylon had been picturing itself. It did so on the walls of its temples, where the painters of the Kandyan kingdom, the Sittara, set down the life of the Buddha and the great jatakas in earth reds and yellows and lampblack, a hereditary craft carried through families and recorded by name in the royal grants: the workshops of Devaragampola and Deldeniya, the rank of Mulachari held by a master of five arts. The island’s own hand is an old one. What changed in the nineteenth century was what that hand chose to draw.
The images by which the wider world came to know Ceylon were, for the most part, the work of visitors, and most of what they set down was the surface of the country: the rock of Sigiriya, the ruined cities of the north, the lake and hills of Kandy, the surf along the southern road, drawn in the picturesque manner the age had brought out from Europe. A few reached for its people as well, and did so with feeling: the chaplain James Cordiner had set down the customs and daily life of the island as early as 1807, and the soldier John Deschamps meant his book of the 1840s to show Ceylon whole, its scenery and its people together. Yet the visitor drew even the daily round from the outside, as a passing sight; the record kept close and from within, over a life rather than a tour, was the ground on which a new kind of island hand began to work.
The temple painter had served religion; the artists who now emerged served science, the newspaper and the street. Their training was makeshift, for drawing in the European manner had no place in the curriculum of the Colombo Academy, the government’s chief school, and what instruction existed was private and irregular. The Colombo Academy had been founded in 1836 as the senior government school of the colony, and in 1881 it took the name it still carries, Royal College. Andrew Nicholl, a Belfast watercolourist of the Royal Hibernian Academy known for landscapes wreathed in borders of wild flowers, was brought out about 1846 by the colonial secretary Emerson Tennent to run a short-lived School of Design, and returned to Europe within a few years; a drawing master from Pondicherry, Hippolyte Silvaf, gave private lessons in Pettah that many of the town’s young men attended. From this thin schooling, and from the demands of the colony itself, the first secular Ceylonese artists came.
The island’s own secular hand reaches back before the British altogether. Under the Dutch, Governor Joan Gideon Loten kept in his household a Ceylonese-born youth, Pieter de Bevere, whom he set to draw the birds, beasts, insects and plants of the island; the watercolours de Bevere made between 1754 and 1757 were carried to Europe and engraved for the zoologies of Pennant and Brown, so that a hand born on the island had entered the record of European science a full lifetime before Peradeniya.
Under the British it was again botany that first drew out the island hand. Harmanis de Alwis Seneviratne, born in 1792, was taken on at the botanic gardens, at Kalutara and then from 1822 at Peradeniya, where the superintendent Alexander Moon paid for his training; across more than forty years he drew upwards of two thousand of the island’s plants with a precision that long outlived him, and founded a dynasty of botanical artists that ran through two further generations. His meticulous sheets are among the earliest sustained bodies of work made by a Ceylonese hand in the colonial age.
The artist who carried the new eye furthest was J.L.K. Van Dort, born in Colombo in 1831 into the settled Dutch Burgher society of the maritime provinces. He earned his keep in the drawing office of the Surveyor-General, but his art belonged to the crowd: the porter and the fruit-seller, the mudaliyar in his finery and the barrister’s clerk, dancers and headmen and the press of a festival street, caught in sketches often no larger than a playing card, with a comic and unsparing eye that stopped always short of cruelty. If the temple painters were the island’s great imagers of the sacred, Van Dort was its foremost illustrator of the everyday.
His medium was the modern one of the printed page. He worked for a home-grown illustrated press that had scarcely existed before him, and carried the island into the London papers besides; and much of what he drew was his own world, the Dutch Burgher community he belonged to and the island’s people of African descent, whose Caffrinha he loved and danced himself. Where the visitor drew Ceylon as a distant prospect, Van Dort drew it as a man among his neighbours.
The price of working from within was obscurity. Van Dort’s drawings lay scattered through newspapers and private hands, and no exhibition gathered them in his lifetime; the reckoning came only in 1951, more than half a century after his death, when a monograph of his work was at last drawn together in Colombo. The scenery of the island had been painted many times over. Its daily life survived only because a few of the island’s own had thought the faces and trades and festivals of the country worth the ink. From the temple wall to the drawing sheet the subject had changed, and the sacred had given place to the human, yet the hand was the same island hand, and it is that record, made for the island rather than for the visitor, that keeps the nineteenth century most alive.
Sources
- Talwatte, Malaka. ‘19th Century Views of Ceylon by British Artists’.
- Van Dort, J.L.K. Ceylon: The Near Past. Compiled by Hilda Obeyesekere Pieris. Colombo, 1951.
- Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art. Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1908.
- Royal Horticultural Society. ‘Harmanis de Alwis: A Botanical Illustrator in Colonial Ceylon.’ RHS Digital Collections.
- R.K. de Silva and W.G.M. Beumer. Illustrations and Views of Dutch Ceylon 1602–1796. 1988.
How to cite this essay
Malaka Talwatte, “The Island's Own Hand: From the Temple Wall to the Drawing Sheet,” Malaka Talwatte: Sri Lankan Art and Ceylon Antiquaria, https://malakatalwatte.pages.dev/publications/islands-own-hand/.
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