‘Sinhalisation ‘of Christ’s scenes
David Paynter was born on March 5,1900 in Uttar Pradesh in North India to missionary parents, Arthur Paynter (British) and Agnes Weerasooriya and educated at Breeks Memorial School, a school for the children of missionaries in South India and at Trinity College , Kandy.
After volunteering in the first World War as a 16-year- old, at the age of 19 he won a five year scholarship to study at the Royal Academy of Art, Britain’s oldest art school and won the Gold Medal there. There on he won the Scott Travelling Scholarship for two years study in Italy.
An Indian art critic writing in the Illustrated Weekly of India in 1952 said that while in England, Paynter was influenced by the post impressionists and the cubists while in Italy he found in the work of Italian primitives (pre Renaissance artists) much that was valuable.
Most Sri Lankans remember Paynter best for his murals at Trinity College in Kandy depicting several scenes from the life of Jesus Christ including the Crucifixion.
“It was about 1930 that the Principal of Trinity College , the Rev. A.G. Frazer and the Vice Principal Mr. Gaster decided to have a chapel built in the Kandyan style, “a building in the vernacular”, as it was decided. The idea was that even if it be a place of worship for Christians, the building should be in harmony with the surroundings. This seemed in those days a revolutionary idea. David Paynter, fresh from the West, fitted into the scheme as the muralist for the Chapel,” the Indian writer noted.
In an article written by Sujatha Kuruwita, librarian of Trinity College Kandy, and available on the College’s official website, the writer quotes the words David Paynter used to describe his work on the chapel in an interview given over Radio Ceylon at the time.
“Having studied art for some time in Italy and France, I found that the painters there had painted their own countries and their own times. So I decided to paint in the way I did, with more or less Ceylon landscapes and more or less Ceylonese types. Besides, I intensely disliked many of the paintings of comparatively recent times where Christ has been portrayed as a blond Englishman and wearing Arab costume….,” he had said.
The “Sinhalisation’ of the paintings depicting the life of Jesus Christ provoked controversy at the time but today his paintings are considered the finest among church paintings in the country and the work of a genius who was way ahead of his time.
David Paynter died of a heart attack on June 7, 1975 and was buried in the Union Church cemetery in Nuwara Eliya.