Fitting a missing portrait into a frame
It was a shot in the dark, my quest to track down a decades-old painting by Stanley Kirinde. A task I undertook after some gentle prodding by the artist’s younger brother. I wasn’t expecting it to come to a happy conclusion but it did and this made me want to share the story.
I had heard the story many times from Stanley Kirinde about the first painting he had been commissioned to do while still schooling at Trinity College in Kandy (TCK). A doctor who lived in Kandy town wanted young Kirinde to do a portrait of his wife.
By then, Stanley’s artistic talents were well known at TCK and around town as he had excelled at all the art competitions walking away with the top prizes. But getting paid to do a painting was an attractive proposition and he had undertaken the task eagerly. Once the portrait was completed, the doctor had asked him to quote a price.
Stanley had been eyeing a bicycle (a model called BSA popular in the late 1940’s/ early 50’s) which he had seen while passing Cargills showroom in Kandy town and once commissioned to do the painting, he had decided that he would ask the doctor to pay him the exact cost of the bicycle. The doctor willingly agreed. “I took the money and went straight to Cargills and purchased the bike and rode off on it,” he would often recollect.
The doctor’s family moved out of Kandy and Stanley too moved on in life and went on to gain a reputation as a well-known artist. The year he had done the painting was also lost to him even though he remembered that he was in his senior year at school at the time.
That was then. Stanley Kirinde passed away in February 2009 at the age of 79. The story of the painting and the bicycle told by my father-in-law would have remained with me as it was but what the painting looked like would have remained a mystery if not for his younger brother Sydney urging me to try and trace it. “Stanley Aiya while still at TCK did a portrait in oils of a Mrs Wickremesinghe, (wife of Dr W.G. Wickremesinghe of the WHO) who lived at Katukelle, Kandy,” Sydney Kirinde wrote to me in an email earlier this year. He also mentioned that he had seen an obituary notice which corresponded with the doctor’s name with a Colombo address, which was the only clue we had to trace the owners of the painting.
I sat on it for quite a while going about my other work but eventually decided to do some online searching during which I found a postal address for a person with an identical name. I wrote a letter identifying myself and stating that I was keen to find out if this was the residence of the same Dr.Wickremesinghe, whose wife had been painted many years ago by young Stanley Kirinde. Sometime later, I had an email from a relative of the doctor and she put me in touch with the person who could shed light on the portrait.
It wasn’t long before I received an email from the lady who now owns the painting.
“I am delighted to let you know that the portrait painted was of my mother, Irangani Aluwehare Wickremesinghe. My father was a surgeon in Kandy and he gave a commission to young Kirinde to paint a portrait of my mother. The oil painting is with me in Sydney (Australia),” she wrote.
A few days later she had several photographs of the painting emailed to me. The name Kirinde was well inscribed at the bottom of the painting in Sinhala as was characteristic of the artist. The year was 1950.
The first thing I did was convey the good news to Sydney Kirinde, if not for whose enthusiasm, we would not have known that the portrait remains well preserved for over 65 years. “The search is finally over,” I wrote to him. “A good bit of investigative journalism,” he wrote back. All in all, the quest for the portrait came to a happy conclusion.