Paul Albert BESNARD

In his account of his travels in Ceylon and India in 1910-1911, published in 1913, Albert Besnard devoted several paragraphs to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Peredeniya, a few kilometres west of the city of Kandy. As he writes, ‘The fabulous garden of Peradeniya, so poetically described by [André] Chevrillon, was my favourite walk during our stay in Kandy, and, as we are about to leave Ceylon for India, I want to return there in order to savour once more its immense melancholy at the foot of the giant bamboos, facing the bluish peaks over which the grey clouds seem to march in long strides, in close ranks, like soldiers going into battle. Silence reigns over this corner of the world; alone, beneath the threat of a sky heavy with an approaching storm, as if to emphasize the strangeness of this natural world, resounds the plaintive cry of the great bats. It is the only voice that rises from this transcendent landscape.

I tried my hand at a few sketches, but to no avail. For how can one capture, in a few strokes of colour, the aspect of a world to which we have no connection whatsoever? How can one convey the strength, the bursting forth of exuberant nature, the vigour of powerful vegetation where the vine, becoming the sister of the tree, makes of its skin a second bark? How can one describe the inconceivable blend of plants and flowers that form, with their colossal thicket, a bulwark against the river that borders Perediniya? And the river itself, how can one retrace its supreme elegance? And that river itself, how can one retrace its sovereign elegance? Ever flowing, its current as measured as that of Time. No obstacle hinders its godlike pace. Tawny as a Hindu, the sky sometimes tinges it with lilac.

For hours I stand gazing at this stream as it flows along the riverbank, illuminated by the sun with the certainty and rhythm of a royal mantle sweeping around a peristyle.

A quick sketch, let alone a study that is too meticulous, and perhaps because of that, cold, cannot convey the majesty of this Paradise, at times sombre due to a cloud, at times bathed in sunshine, through the centre of which these heavy, golden waters slowly flow.’

Three watercolour views of the gardens at Peradeniya, one of which may have been the present sheet, were included in Besnard’s exhibition Voyage aux Indes at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris in 1912. As one critic noted of the exhibition, ‘without doubt it counts as the most important artistic event of the present year…Paintings, water-colours, and drawings, all were of so beautiful a conception, all were instinct with such power, that it is really difficult, and, indeed, almost impossible, to describe and explain his achievement by mere words…More than ever before Besnard has sought for brilliancy of colouring and strong effects; he passes from one tone to another with the utmost boldness…He seems to me to have extracted from the people and from their surroundings the characteristics essential to them, and to have expressed in his notes and sketches just that elusive something which it seems almost impossibe to capture.’