Cambodian Dancers by Sir Gerald Kelly (1937)
by Gerald F. Kelly
Author: Gerald F. Kelly
In 1936, Irish painter Sir Gerald Kelly (1876−1972) visited Cambodia during a world tour with wife Lilian (“Jane”), and portrayed several dancers at the Dance Hall of Phnom Penh Royal Palace. If the costumes and body gestures are rendered with great mastery, these graceful Khmer dancers are still getting confused with Burmese ones in catalogs and art auctions worldwide, probably because the artist had visited Burma earlier, in 1908 – 1909, and developed his fascination for Southeast Asian classical dance.
A quick survey of Kelly’s body-of-work on Internet shows that despite their characteristic outfits and features — and the fact that the artist often gave the name of his models, such as “Neac Thul” (for Neak Thul), “Sem”, “Sun” (for Saona) –, the Khmer dancers are wrongly depicted as “Burmese”:
Recently, a researcher from Myanmar (ex Burma), Tint Htoo Aung (တင့် ထူး အောင်), has corrected this common confusion by posting some of the photographs shown above under the header “Khmer dancers”.
Gerald Kelly became indeed a famous portrait painter with his 1931 portrait of the Shawn Princess Sao Ohn Nyunt:
And he had spent several months in Rangoon two decades earlier, documenting the art of Burmese court dance. In this delicate and lively sketch, he pictured the “Yein”, a group performance of young girls at the Royal Palace known as Nan Twin Ah Phyo Taw Yein:
Even if Sir Gerald’s visit to Cambodia was briefer, his eye for details and his knowledge of Southeast Asian dance would have prevented him to confuse Cambodian dancers with Burmese ones. We can also note that his own style had evolved during these nearly thirty years:
Many of these paintings were completed in the 1950s. One one 1950 photograph of the artist in his London studio, we can see a painting of a Khmer dancer in the background:
Tags: dance, dancers, Burma, Khmer dance, Burmese dance, paintings, British artists, Royal Ballet of Cambodia
About the Photographer
Gerald F. Kelly
Sir Gerald Festus Kelly (9 April 1879, London – 5 Jan. 1972, Exmouth) was a Irish-British illustrious painter known for his portraits (including those of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother), and for his graceful depictions of Southeast Asian princesses and female dancers.
Born into a wealthy family, Gerald Kelly went to Eton College and Cambridge before moving to Paris to study art. There, he met many notorious artists, such as Rodin and Cézanne, and befriended British writer Somerset Maugham.
After his failed love affair with a Montmartre French dancer, Maugham — who was to reflect Kelly in various of his fictitious characters, for instance as Lionel Hillier in Cakes and Ale and as Frederick Lawson in Of Human Bondage — encouraged him to travel to Burma (now Myanmar) in 1908. Kelly thus went to Southeast Asia before Maugham himself, and on the boat over met an Old Etonian appointed as District Judge of Mandalay. Enchanted by the “gorgeous landscape, and how sweet the women and children were” during his stay from November 1908 to April 1909, he painted a vast amount of post-impressionist landscapes and Burmese dancers portraits.
Burmese Dancer, circa 1909
In Rangoon, he was the guest of Daw Mya May (the wife of nationalist U May Oung), a well known socialite and patron of the arts. It was likely in her house that he met the Burmese dancers Ma Si Gyaw and Ma Sein Nu. But it was back in London, in 1931, that he met and painted the Shan Princess Sao Ohn Nyunt. The young lady, who had traveled for the Roundtable Conferences on Constitutional Reform in Burma and India, was “bored to tears” by England and its abominable weather, according to Kelly (quoted in the 2014 Christie’s Catalog), yet her portrait established his reputation as a major Orientalist painter, and to these days reproductions remain popular across the Commonwealth.
With wife Lilian Ryan, a model Kelly had married in 1920 and who was his official muse under the name of Jane, the artist traveled extensively, from Spain to the Americas. Their world tour in 1936 – 1937 brought them to China, Vietnam, Japan and Cambodia, where Kelly rekindled his passion for dancers, portraying several female performers of the Royal Ballet in Phnom Penh.
A favourite painter of the British Royal Family, he was the President of the Royal Academy of Arts from 1949 to 1954, after being knighted in 1945. Congenial and caustic, Sir Gerald was never “academic”, though, and the painting he presented as Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation Gift in 1953 (RCIN 923040 in the Royal Collection Trust) was titled “Sem, A Cambodian dancer”.
Also working as a TV presenter, Sir Gerald continued to paint until in his 90s, when his deficient eyesight forced him to give up the brush. His personal archive kept as the National Portrait Gallery of London reflects the way he researched his compositions, taking photographs during his travels, collecting postcards and sketches…Dance and female dancers remained a major theme in his body of work: during his numerous trips to Spain, for instance, he painted in Seville “Consuelo, A Seville Chorus Girl”. Sir Gerald always made a point in naming his dancing subjects, an acknowledgement of their status as “true” artists.
Author’s photo: Myanmore