Discerning & Learning from George Keyt-by Uditha Devapriya
Source:Thuppahis
The Island, 18 May 2025, where the title reads “Searcing for George Keyt”
George Keyt, Sri Lanka’s most celebrated painter, died 32 years ago in 1993. During his life and after his death, he became the subject of several studies by Sri Lankan and foreign scholars. Today his paintings have found their way to some of the biggest art collections in his country, as well as to places like Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
Taken together, these paintings represent some of the finest examples of modern art in Sri Lanka and Asia. They have also become symbols of Asian modernism.
Born in 1901 in the mountainous region of Kandy, some 75 miles from Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo, George Keyt hailed from a middle-class family that had become thoroughly Westernised and Anglicised. They belonged to the Burgher community, an ethnic group which traces its descent from the Portuguese and the Dutch.
By the 20th century the Burghers had acquired a distinct identity and were dominating professions such as law and medicine. They had acquired a respectable, if intermediate, social position, not unlike the Anglo-Indian community.
Keyt chose to reject this inheritance. Turning away from his Christian and Westernised upbringing, he embraced Buddhism and learnt Sinhalese, the language of Sri Lanka’s ethnic majority, along with Pali and possibly Sanskrit, from Buddhist monks. Refusing to conform to the lifestyle of his peers, he immersed himself in the culture of his land.
Chapel, Trinity College Kandy / Photo by Author
Keyt attended Trinity College, the leading school in Kandy, founded by Anglican missionaries in the 19th century. At Trinity he acquired a rather notorious reputation. He found lessons boring and was constantly punished by his teachers for not paying attention. Yet he read widely and was encouraged to read by its principal, Alexander Garden Fraser. Something of a nonconformist himself, Fraser took a great personal interest in Keyt and allowed him to visit the library. These interventions moulded Keyt.
In 1908, seven years after Keyt was born, the Oriental scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy published his work on Kandyan culture, Mediaeval Sinhalese Art.
Keyt read Coomaraswamy’s book and was moved by his insights on Kandyan art and craft. He made it a point to visit the temples of Kandy and to observe their murals. Dismissed as inferior by cultural elites, in Coomaraswamy’s view these murals exemplified the patterns and beliefs of a simple people. For Keyt too they acquired a living relevance. Not surprisingly, in his first few essays and drawings, he focused on Buddhist themes.
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In the 1940s Keyt discovered the art and culture of India. At the height of World War II, he travelled there, visited the shrines of Bhubaneswar and Konark, among other places, and forged connections with several Indian artists, including the novelist and activist Mulk Raj Anand and the painter M. F. Husain.
These friendships came to the fore in 1947, when Mulk Raj Anand brought together a group of like-minded personalities of the day to organise an exhibition of Keyt’s paintings at the Convocation Hall of the University of Bombay. These included the European émigrés Walter Langhammer, Rudolf von Leyden, and Emanuel Schlesinger; the nuclear physicist and Renaissance Man Homi Bhabha; the criminal lawyer Karl Khandalavala; the art collector and gallery ow
ner Kekoo Gandhy; and the publisher Manu Thacker.
Rasa Lila / Oil on Canvas / 1936 / 59.5 x 102 cm / Taprobane Collection
In his own country, he remained renowned to his last. He lived to see three acclaimed studies on him. In 1950 his close friend Martin Russell wrote George Keyt. It was published by Marg, the art and architecture magazine founded by Mulk Raj Anand.
In 1989 another close friend, the Sri Lankan bibliographer and librarian H. A. I. Goonetileke, published George Keyt: A Life In Art. Goonetileke’s book is concise, and it refers to Keyt’s earliest paintings, which have rarely been evaluated in relation to his wider career. Then, in 1991, the anthropologist Dr Sunil Goonesekera wrote a monograph on him, Intepretations, published by the Institute of Fundamental Studies in Kandy.
Russell, Goonetileke, and Goonesekera all had the chance to meet and converse with Keyt. So did Albert Dharmasiri, a painter-scholar who authored the most recent study, George Keyt: A Portrait of the Artist (National Trust of Sri Lanka, Colombo 2020). Yet perhaps the most comprehensive study on him was written by someone who never met him. In 2017 the Indian art historian Yashodhara Dalmia wrote Buddha to Krishna: Life and Times of George Keyt. Published by Routledge, it remains an indispensable guide to Keyt.
