In August, the Netherlands signed an ownership transfer of the artefacts.
The restitution event will be open to the public and will comprise activities to educate young and old on the long-shared history of Sri Lanka and the Netherlands.
With the restitution, the Netherlands aim to strengthen the cultural cooperation between the two countries, while also coming to terms with its colonial past.
The objects will get a place in the National Museum.
More about the Sri Lankan objects returned by Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
Doreen van den Boogaart and Alicia Schrikker write about the provenance of the six objects that will be returned. Ganga Rajinee Dissanayaka focusses on the most famous of these, Lewke’s Cannon.
Our provenance research included a reconstruction of the wanderings of each object from the palace of Kandy to the Dutch Stadholder’s collection. We discuss the research process, and highlight the problem of archival silences and histories of forgetting, and of mis- and re-interpretations that haunted these objects and troubled us along the way.
Lewke’s Cannon: A Visual and Political Dialogue Captured in Gold and Silver
This article shows that the decoration and inscription on the outer surface of the cannon were applied as a gift from the prominent Sri Lankan figure Lewke to King Sri Vijaya Rajasinha of Kandy in 1745-46 and as such represents an internal political moment in the Kandyan kingdom. The research into the cannon brings to the fore the Sri Lankan craftsmanship of this eighteenth-century South Asian region. While ancient Lankan motifs have been applied, the craftsmen were able to emphasize the motifs already present in the bronze cast from the seventeenth-century Netherlands.
