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Lot Essay
From a Western perspective, George Keyt’s work from the 1930s onwards is often described in the context of Cubism or Fauvism and compared with the oeuvres of Paul Gauguin, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso or Henri Matisse. However, the sensuality and spirituality Keyt always imbibed in his drawings and paintings underscore their enduring connection with the classical artistic traditions of South Asia, from ancient frescoes and temple sculpture to Rajput court paintings and Kalighat patas. Grounded in these traditions, Keyt’s work rejected the limitations of Western academic art to embrace what we now term global modernism, paving the way for other artists in South Asia to forge new idioms of their own as well as a new artistic identity for the region.
The present lot, an illustrated book of 23 poems that Keyt created for his daughter Diana in 1938, sheds light on a unique aspect of the artist’s early career, at the intersection of his expertise as an observer, artist and writer and his family life and role as a father. Filling the pages of one of his sketchbooks, these verses were most likely created to memorialize the stories of the varied cast of characters that Keyt had painted on the walls of Diana’s nursery after she was born in 1935. As she recalls, “When I was born my father delighted in this new little person, playing and creating stories and pictures to amuse me. As I started to babble and then to talk, he put down these pictures and rhymes in a book.” (D. Keyt, ‘Keyt’s sketches to a daughter’, The Sunday Times, Colombo, 10 November 2013). The format of this book and its rhymes may be compared to the ‘nonsense rhymes’ of Edward Lear, and to the work of Ogden Nash and Roald Dahl, published later.
The 23 verses of this book are richly populated with human and animal characters, heroes and villains, their quirks and foibles encapsulating the worries and enchantments of his daughter’s life as a two-year-old. Keyt includes a wide range of characters here, some imagined and some picked from Diana’s life, like Auntie Suja (Sujatha Aluwihare, a beloved colleague of Diana’s aunt Peggy) who moved away, the family pets, Plato and Polly, and the dhoby or local clothes washer. Keyt’s unique understanding of his child’s emotions and imagination, and his ability to represent them in his art and verse, is what brings this little book to life. The mighty stork he paints certainly has the proud eyes that Keyt describes in the rhyme accompanying it, and Kaputa Kingkinee Ranjan Roy really does look like “a hideous kind of a naughty boy”. The natural connections that Keyt is able to make between the text and the illustrations, and the variety of characters and situations he conjures makes this collection of rhymes one that appeals to “people of all reasonable ages”.
Perhaps the most interesting character in this collection of illustrated verses is the gombee, who makes an appearance in four of the rhymes. When he published ten of these verses the next year in Ceylon Observer Pictorial, he titled them ‘Reasonable Rhymes for people of all reasonable ages’, and added a note explaining this character. “Gombee is two-year-old slang for ‘Gombel-la’ which is, as you know, a snail” (D.C. Ranatunga, ‘When Keyt told a different tale’, The Sunday Times, Colombo, 22 April 2001). Diana recalls the gombee being the antagonist of her childhood that would ravage her grandmother’s garden. Keyt takes this object of fear and gives it a story as a way to mitigate Diana’s fears.
The tale of the gombee is dispersed through the book and the rhymes read as follows:
‘The gombee will not sleep at night / But sits up calling, calling, / The leaves are heavy, the leaves are dead, / The trees look down at the gombee falling / falling on his head.’
‘Whenever you see a gombee dance / You may safely say / That’s quite by chance. / They seldom see themselves as others / For gombees never see their brothers.’
‘How do they take away tills at night / Tell me, how do they take away tills, / The shivering gombees / Pale with fright / How do they / Wrapped in purple and white / How do they take away tills?’
‘The big trees cry / The little trees hum / To see the gombees / Come and come. / They bring their friends / They come to the trees / They hang on the boughs / And swing in the breeze.’
In 2013, to celebrate the artist’s centenary, Diana Keyt published a facsimile edition of this special book to share her father’s wit and talent with other children around the world. “Included in the book are photographs from our family collection and on the cover is a portrait my father painted of me with my first born child. This is the first time these very personal images will go out into the world. Even now as I turn its pages I feel I am back in that happy place. In my mind I hear the wind in the rain trees and the sound of evening music floating over the water from the temple across the lake” (D. Keyt, ‘Keyt’s sketches to a daughter’, The Sunday Times, Colombo, 10 November 2013).
The present lot, an illustrated book of 23 poems that Keyt created for his daughter Diana in 1938, sheds light on a unique aspect of the artist’s early career, at the intersection of his expertise as an observer, artist and writer and his family life and role as a father. Filling the pages of one of his sketchbooks, these verses were most likely created to memorialize the stories of the varied cast of characters that Keyt had painted on the walls of Diana’s nursery after she was born in 1935. As she recalls, “When I was born my father delighted in this new little person, playing and creating stories and pictures to amuse me. As I started to babble and then to talk, he put down these pictures and rhymes in a book.” (D. Keyt, ‘Keyt’s sketches to a daughter’, The Sunday Times, Colombo, 10 November 2013). The format of this book and its rhymes may be compared to the ‘nonsense rhymes’ of Edward Lear, and to the work of Ogden Nash and Roald Dahl, published later.
The 23 verses of this book are richly populated with human and animal characters, heroes and villains, their quirks and foibles encapsulating the worries and enchantments of his daughter’s life as a two-year-old. Keyt includes a wide range of characters here, some imagined and some picked from Diana’s life, like Auntie Suja (Sujatha Aluwihare, a beloved colleague of Diana’s aunt Peggy) who moved away, the family pets, Plato and Polly, and the dhoby or local clothes washer. Keyt’s unique understanding of his child’s emotions and imagination, and his ability to represent them in his art and verse, is what brings this little book to life. The mighty stork he paints certainly has the proud eyes that Keyt describes in the rhyme accompanying it, and Kaputa Kingkinee Ranjan Roy really does look like “a hideous kind of a naughty boy”. The natural connections that Keyt is able to make between the text and the illustrations, and the variety of characters and situations he conjures makes this collection of rhymes one that appeals to “people of all reasonable ages”.
Perhaps the most interesting character in this collection of illustrated verses is the gombee, who makes an appearance in four of the rhymes. When he published ten of these verses the next year in Ceylon Observer Pictorial, he titled them ‘Reasonable Rhymes for people of all reasonable ages’, and added a note explaining this character. “Gombee is two-year-old slang for ‘Gombel-la’ which is, as you know, a snail” (D.C. Ranatunga, ‘When Keyt told a different tale’, The Sunday Times, Colombo, 22 April 2001). Diana recalls the gombee being the antagonist of her childhood that would ravage her grandmother’s garden. Keyt takes this object of fear and gives it a story as a way to mitigate Diana’s fears.
The tale of the gombee is dispersed through the book and the rhymes read as follows:
‘The gombee will not sleep at night / But sits up calling, calling, / The leaves are heavy, the leaves are dead, / The trees look down at the gombee falling / falling on his head.’
‘Whenever you see a gombee dance / You may safely say / That’s quite by chance. / They seldom see themselves as others / For gombees never see their brothers.’
‘How do they take away tills at night / Tell me, how do they take away tills, / The shivering gombees / Pale with fright / How do they / Wrapped in purple and white / How do they take away tills?’
‘The big trees cry / The little trees hum / To see the gombees / Come and come. / They bring their friends / They come to the trees / They hang on the boughs / And swing in the breeze.’
In 2013, to celebrate the artist’s centenary, Diana Keyt published a facsimile edition of this special book to share her father’s wit and talent with other children around the world. “Included in the book are photographs from our family collection and on the cover is a portrait my father painted of me with my first born child. This is the first time these very personal images will go out into the world. Even now as I turn its pages I feel I am back in that happy place. In my mind I hear the wind in the rain trees and the sound of evening music floating over the water from the temple across the lake” (D. Keyt, ‘Keyt’s sketches to a daughter’, The Sunday Times, Colombo, 10 November 2013).