Celyon 1916

Ceylon 1916 records Bartlett's visit to the island now known as Sri Lanka, a stop on the maritime route between India and Southeast Asia that brought the artist through some of the most visually spectacular landscapes in the tropics. Ceylon's combination of palm-fringed coastlines, ancient Buddhist ruins, lush hill country, and richly diverse population offered Bartlett abundant subject matter.

This oban woodblock print translates the tropical intensity of the island into the controlled language of Japanese printmaking. The warm, saturated colors required to convey Ceylon's equatorial light and vegetation pushed the woodblock palette beyond its typical range of cool blues and muted greens. Bartlett's achievement in his Asian travel prints was to prove that the Japanese woodblock technique could accommodate subjects far from its cultural origins without losing the medium's essential qualities of precision, luminosity, and tonal subtlety.