Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (Sri Lankan, 1877–1947)

Ananda Coomaraswamy was best known as a scholar and curator of Indian art. Following his studies at the University of London, he returned to Southeast Asia to head the Mineralogical Survey of Ceylon. He became fascinated with the traditional and ancient arts of his country and soon devoted himself to their study, publishing numerous books and articles over a long and distinguished career.

During the early 1920s Coomaraswamy became the first curator of Indian art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he assembled the first public collection of Indian art in the United States. He also was responsible for acquiring work by Alfred Stieglitz, whom he persuaded in 1924 to donate a group of 27 photographs. With this gift, the Museum of Fine Arts became one of the first major museums to include photography in its permanent collection.

Coomaraswamy was a photographer himself, documenting many works of Indian art. From around 1918 through the early 1930s, he took numerous landscape photographs, as well as many pictures of dancer Stella Bloch, whom he married in 1922. He exhibited his images in photographic salons in Toronto, as well as in Buffalo and Pittsburgh, and took part in the Third Annual International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1924.

Coomaraswamy was a member of the Pictorial Photographers of America, and in April 1925 presented a lecture on art and photography at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York. M.M.