Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy (born Aug. 22, 1877, Colombo, Ceylon—died Sept. 9, 1947, Needham, Mass., U.S.) was a pioneer historian of Indian art and foremost interpreter of Indian culture to the West. He was concerned with the meaning of a work of art within a traditional culture and with examining the religious and philosophical beliefs that determine the origin and evolution of a particular artistic style. A careful scholar, he also established an art historical framework for the study of the development of Indian art.

Of mixed Ceylonese and British parentage, he was educated at Wycliffe College and the University of London, where he earned a doctorate in geology. He was named director of mineral surveys for Ceylon in 1903 but soon transferred his interests to the arts of Ceylon and India. In 1910–11 Coomaraswamy was placed in charge of the art section of the great United Provinces Exhibition in Allāhābād, India. Six years later, when the Dennison W. Ross Collection was donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, he was appointed the museum’s fellow for research in Indian, Persian, and Muslim art, a post that he held until his death. He enhanced the museum’s Indian collections but was primarily concerned with scholarship and contributed extensively to learned journals throughout the world.

His publications ranged over Indian music, dance, and Vedic literature and philosophy, as well as art. He also contributed to Islāmic and Far Eastern studies. Coomaraswamy’s definitive Catalogue of the Indian Collections in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was published in five volumes during 1923–30; the History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927) became the standard text in the field. The Transformation of Nature in Art (1934) and Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought (1946) are collections of essays expressing his views on the relationship of art to life, traditional art, and the ideological parallels between the arts of the East and the pre-Renaissance West.