Searching for George Keyt

George Keyt, Sri Lanka’s most celebrated painter, died 32 years ago in 1993.

- BY UDITHA DEVAPRIYA

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.

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.