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Lot Essay
Ivan Peries’ pictures have something of a dream-like quality but his dreams have also a persuasive reality. Never sentimental, his melodies of colour and feeling are continually enhance by a genuine sensuousness and yet never merely sensuous, they are informed by a superb intellectual control.
- S. Bandarnayake, 1981
Following his early training under artists David Paynter and Harry Pieris, Ivan Peries became one of the founder members of the seminal ’43 Group in Colombo, breaking from traditional art forms to explore the potential of modern Sri Lankan painting. The artist left for England after winning a Government Scholarship to study there in 1945, and spent three years at the Anglo-French Institute in St. John’s Wood in London. After a short return to Sri Lanka in 1949, Peries moved back to England in 1953, where he lived in Southend-on-Sea with his family till his death in 1988.
Despite spending the majority of his life as part of the postcolonial diaspora, his friend and biographer Senake Bandarnayake notes, “there is nothing in his work which is outside the Ceylonese experience, nothing which displays a distance in subject, style or attitude from Ceylonese life or Ceylonese modes of feeling... It is the work of a singular and original creative mind nurtured throughout two decades abroad by the lasting experience of a distant homeland” (N. Weereratne, 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years of Art in Sri Lanka, Melbourne, 1993, p. 117).
Working in England, far from the place he spent his childhood on the idyllic western coast of Sri Lanka, Peries’ romanticized depictions of the Ceylonese coast and Laccadive Sea were central to the burgeoning modernist movement in Sri Lanka pushed forward by him and the other members of the 43 Group such as Lionel Wendt, George Claessen, Justin Daraniyagala and George Keyt. While Peries broke out of the strict conventions of the Ceylon Society of Arts, there remained in his work some continuity with the traditions that preceded it. “The purification and idealisation of experience that is a persistent quality of Peries’ art, the prevailing moods, the often gentle and controlled handling of feeling and emotion, the almost melodic use of colour continually enhanced by a genuine sensuousness, are all qualities which echo some major aspect of the Sinhalese artistic tradition. His work, we could say, would eminently satisfy that central requirement of classic Indian and Ceylonese aesthetic theory embodied in the concept of rasa, a state of mind provoked by aesthetic experience and denoting profound pleasure, joy, and exaltation” (S. Bandaranayake, ‘Ivan Peries: (Paintings 1939–1969) The Predicament of the Bourgeois Artist in the Societies of the Third World’, Third Text, Vol. 1, Issue 2, 1987, unpaginated).
The present lot, a panoramic scene titled The Well painted in 1957, is one of Peries’ most important works, and the only of his monumental set of seven ‘panel paintings’ to ever be presented at auction. In each of these works, Peries presents “a world, neither ancient or modern, clearly recognizable, strangely, hauntingly meaningful and yet ultimately outside the natural experience. Neither esoteric nor unreal, their reality has been pitched at a point of mystery or fantasy, understandable only in its own purely pictorial terms. If the landscapes are musical, these paintings are pre-eminently literary, poetic, but entirely in a painterly way. The soft paint of the landscapes often yields here to a sharp and brilliant colouration and a great precision of form, a crisper line, imparting a hard surface to the mysteries” (S. Bandaranayake & M. Fonseka, Ivan Peries, Paintings 1938-88, Colombo, 1996, pp. 14, 15).
Reminiscent of Henri Rousseau’s magical landscapes as well as Paul Gauguin’s idyllic images of life in Tahiti, this large format painting portrays a charming village by the sea. Under a rising morning sun, the sea appears deep violet yet tranquil. Two women, one nude in the foreground with a soulful expression and the other in a pale pink wrap with shadowed features, approach the community well with their pots to gather the water with which they will bathe. The central nude figure and the finely detailed cloth with repeating bird motifs that hangs from a washing line behind her are the least stylized elements of the scene, immediately drawing the viewer’s attention. The figures of men, goats and birds complete the composition, poised at varying distances from the viewer between the huts and trees that dot the landscape. A vivid panorama, this painting celebrates the joyous simplicity of everyday life in rural Sri Lanka.
Created between 1947 and 1960, Peries’ seven large ‘panel paintings’, including the present lot, are each marked by a specific mood. Together these panels represent the “fullest expression” of the artist’s poetic oeuvre and the apex of his experiments with coloration. “They are the most ambitious paintings he attempted and must be numbered among his major works. In this series of river and beach scenes with a group or groups of figures set in elaborately constructed landscapes, Peries presents us with a vision of rural life in an undefined and suspended moment between work and leisure; a time of quiet, relaxed community. It is not surprising that most of these scenes are connected with water and bathing, a familiar aspect of the daily round of rural or suburban Sri Lankan life. Peries has turned his apprehension of village and beach into a kind of fantastic tableau or panorama. More visual than existential, they are yet totally convincing because they recreate an idealized experience of complex harmonies between man and nature, in compelling, hard-edged images. If these visions have something of a dream-like quality, the dreams have also a persuasive reality” (S. Bandaranayake & M. Fonseka, Ivan Peries, Paintings 1938-88, Colombo, 1996, pp. 15-16).
According to his biographers “Peries is not a painter of fact but of feeling, and even in his most detailed representational scenes the subject of the picture becomes a means by which the artist explores and expresses his own inner feelings as much as those generated by the visual image itself. He reconstructs the elements of a familiar visual experience, usually by a process of simplification, and reassembles them in an entirely personalized way which invests these pictures with their most remarkable artistic qualities; and in this resets what one might call the modernity of these paintings. In them Peries has, so to speak, invented a modern Ceylonese ‘landscape’ art” (S. Bandaranayake, ‘Ivan Peries: (Paintings 1939–1969) The Predicament of the Bourgeois Artist in the Societies of the Third World’, Third Text, Vol. 1, Issue 2, 1987, unpaginated).
Exhibited at the XXIX Biennale Internazionale d'Arte in Venice in 1958, the present lot is not just one of the most important works by Ivan Peries to be offered at auction, it is certainly among the most significant Sri Lankan paintings of the Twentieth Century.
- S. Bandarnayake, 1981
Following his early training under artists David Paynter and Harry Pieris, Ivan Peries became one of the founder members of the seminal ’43 Group in Colombo, breaking from traditional art forms to explore the potential of modern Sri Lankan painting. The artist left for England after winning a Government Scholarship to study there in 1945, and spent three years at the Anglo-French Institute in St. John’s Wood in London. After a short return to Sri Lanka in 1949, Peries moved back to England in 1953, where he lived in Southend-on-Sea with his family till his death in 1988.
Despite spending the majority of his life as part of the postcolonial diaspora, his friend and biographer Senake Bandarnayake notes, “there is nothing in his work which is outside the Ceylonese experience, nothing which displays a distance in subject, style or attitude from Ceylonese life or Ceylonese modes of feeling... It is the work of a singular and original creative mind nurtured throughout two decades abroad by the lasting experience of a distant homeland” (N. Weereratne, 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years of Art in Sri Lanka, Melbourne, 1993, p. 117).
Working in England, far from the place he spent his childhood on the idyllic western coast of Sri Lanka, Peries’ romanticized depictions of the Ceylonese coast and Laccadive Sea were central to the burgeoning modernist movement in Sri Lanka pushed forward by him and the other members of the 43 Group such as Lionel Wendt, George Claessen, Justin Daraniyagala and George Keyt. While Peries broke out of the strict conventions of the Ceylon Society of Arts, there remained in his work some continuity with the traditions that preceded it. “The purification and idealisation of experience that is a persistent quality of Peries’ art, the prevailing moods, the often gentle and controlled handling of feeling and emotion, the almost melodic use of colour continually enhanced by a genuine sensuousness, are all qualities which echo some major aspect of the Sinhalese artistic tradition. His work, we could say, would eminently satisfy that central requirement of classic Indian and Ceylonese aesthetic theory embodied in the concept of rasa, a state of mind provoked by aesthetic experience and denoting profound pleasure, joy, and exaltation” (S. Bandaranayake, ‘Ivan Peries: (Paintings 1939–1969) The Predicament of the Bourgeois Artist in the Societies of the Third World’, Third Text, Vol. 1, Issue 2, 1987, unpaginated).
The present lot, a panoramic scene titled The Well painted in 1957, is one of Peries’ most important works, and the only of his monumental set of seven ‘panel paintings’ to ever be presented at auction. In each of these works, Peries presents “a world, neither ancient or modern, clearly recognizable, strangely, hauntingly meaningful and yet ultimately outside the natural experience. Neither esoteric nor unreal, their reality has been pitched at a point of mystery or fantasy, understandable only in its own purely pictorial terms. If the landscapes are musical, these paintings are pre-eminently literary, poetic, but entirely in a painterly way. The soft paint of the landscapes often yields here to a sharp and brilliant colouration and a great precision of form, a crisper line, imparting a hard surface to the mysteries” (S. Bandaranayake & M. Fonseka, Ivan Peries, Paintings 1938-88, Colombo, 1996, pp. 14, 15).
Reminiscent of Henri Rousseau’s magical landscapes as well as Paul Gauguin’s idyllic images of life in Tahiti, this large format painting portrays a charming village by the sea. Under a rising morning sun, the sea appears deep violet yet tranquil. Two women, one nude in the foreground with a soulful expression and the other in a pale pink wrap with shadowed features, approach the community well with their pots to gather the water with which they will bathe. The central nude figure and the finely detailed cloth with repeating bird motifs that hangs from a washing line behind her are the least stylized elements of the scene, immediately drawing the viewer’s attention. The figures of men, goats and birds complete the composition, poised at varying distances from the viewer between the huts and trees that dot the landscape. A vivid panorama, this painting celebrates the joyous simplicity of everyday life in rural Sri Lanka.
Created between 1947 and 1960, Peries’ seven large ‘panel paintings’, including the present lot, are each marked by a specific mood. Together these panels represent the “fullest expression” of the artist’s poetic oeuvre and the apex of his experiments with coloration. “They are the most ambitious paintings he attempted and must be numbered among his major works. In this series of river and beach scenes with a group or groups of figures set in elaborately constructed landscapes, Peries presents us with a vision of rural life in an undefined and suspended moment between work and leisure; a time of quiet, relaxed community. It is not surprising that most of these scenes are connected with water and bathing, a familiar aspect of the daily round of rural or suburban Sri Lankan life. Peries has turned his apprehension of village and beach into a kind of fantastic tableau or panorama. More visual than existential, they are yet totally convincing because they recreate an idealized experience of complex harmonies between man and nature, in compelling, hard-edged images. If these visions have something of a dream-like quality, the dreams have also a persuasive reality” (S. Bandaranayake & M. Fonseka, Ivan Peries, Paintings 1938-88, Colombo, 1996, pp. 15-16).
According to his biographers “Peries is not a painter of fact but of feeling, and even in his most detailed representational scenes the subject of the picture becomes a means by which the artist explores and expresses his own inner feelings as much as those generated by the visual image itself. He reconstructs the elements of a familiar visual experience, usually by a process of simplification, and reassembles them in an entirely personalized way which invests these pictures with their most remarkable artistic qualities; and in this resets what one might call the modernity of these paintings. In them Peries has, so to speak, invented a modern Ceylonese ‘landscape’ art” (S. Bandaranayake, ‘Ivan Peries: (Paintings 1939–1969) The Predicament of the Bourgeois Artist in the Societies of the Third World’, Third Text, Vol. 1, Issue 2, 1987, unpaginated).
Exhibited at the XXIX Biennale Internazionale d'Arte in Venice in 1958, the present lot is not just one of the most important works by Ivan Peries to be offered at auction, it is certainly among the most significant Sri Lankan paintings of the Twentieth Century.