Artists of the Ceylon Art Society

The artists associated with the Ceylon Society of Arts represent the generation of Sri Lankan painters working in an academic, Western-derived style - realistic proportion, conventional perspective, formal portraiture and landscape - before the 1943 emergence of the '43 Group pushed Sri Lankan painting toward modernism.

This lesson pairs directly with the Ceylon Art Society and '43 Group lessons elsewhere in the unit: the most useful thing to have ready is the contrast between the two - academic realism versus modernist experimentation - since that shift is the central narrative this whole part of the syllabus is building toward.