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Born Sri Lankan but equally at home in India, George Keyt evolved a highly individual vocabulary rooted in traditional ethos of the land yet inspired by Western modernism. The work under consideration here is an example of European modernism, the palette quite in the vein of Paul Gauguin’s Haitian paintings. But Keyt’s genius lay in adopting the European cubist syntax and marrying it with the traditional art of South Asia—the sharp cubist angle of the subject’s forehead is balanced by the ballooning line of the chin and the lush tropical foliage takes the viewer to a field in South Asia.