Ananda Coomaraswamy 1877 – 1947

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was a Sri Lankan-born philosopher of art and metaphysics and one of the principal exponents of the Traditionalist school of thought in the twentieth century. After early studies in mineralogy and a long period of work on the history of South Asian art, he became curator of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he produced an extraordinary series of essays on the philosophical foundations of traditional art and religion. His Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art and Hinduism and Buddhism articulated a comparative metaphysics of the perennial wisdom traditions.

Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was born at Colombo in Ceylon in August 1877, the son of the Tamil jurist Sir Mutu Coomaraswamy — the first Asian called to the English bar — and his English wife Elizabeth Beeby. After his father's death the family settled in England; he took his bachelor of science with first-class honours at University College London in 1900 in geology and botany. From 1903 to 1907 he directed the Mineralogical Survey of Ceylon, the work that drew his attention to the decay of indigenous craft traditions and turned him from natural science to the study of South Asian art. In 1917 he emigrated to the United States as Keeper of Indian and Mohammedan Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he served until his death.

His books include Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908), The Aims of Indian Art (1908), Rajput Painting (1916), The Dance of Shiva (1918), the two-volume Yaksas (1928–1931), the History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927), Hinduism and Buddhism (1943), Time and Eternity (1947), and the essays of Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art (1956).

Coomaraswamy founded the modern Western study of Indian art and almost single-handedly assembled the Boston Museum's South and East Asian collections. From the 1930s his work joined the Traditionalist or perennialist current of René Guénon and Frithjof Schuon, on which the great religions of East and West are diverse expressions of one metaphysics of the sacred; he treated traditional art as a sacred science and modern individualism as its decay. He died at Needham, Massachusetts, in September 1947.