1977 - Sri Lanka - Flora and Fauna
Laki Senanayaka Paintings

Laki Senanayaka's Paintings are displayed to illustrate how the layout design of each note was developed to the finally issued 1979 Sri Lanka - Flora and Fauna currency notes, which are directly compared. in the links below for each denomination.

		155x76 mm	Rs 100 note
		146x73 mm	Rs 50 note
		137x70 mm	Rs 20 note
		127x67 mm	Rs 10 note
		118x64 mm	Rs 5 note
		108x60 mm	Rs 2 note

• Followed two Flora and Fauna not accepted designs suggested in 1975 by BWCL essays, and 1976 by TDLR essays to change all of the denominations.
• According to Tuan Sallay each of the notes was to have had Flora and Fauna from a range of altitudes from lowerst Rs 2 at sea level to the highest Rs 100 for Central HighLands above 2000 meters.
  However Michael Meyler points out the back of the Rs 5 note and the Rs 50 note are both set in Sinharaja. The back of the Rs10 and the Rs20 in the hill country.
• The back of the notes for the first time switched to Portrait mode, on Laki's request and has remined that way for all future series of definitive currency notes issued in Sri Lanka.
• Chinese Notes that have used the Portrait mode for a very long time. Other than those only the 1975 National Bank of Switzerland notes predates them in adopting this Portrait back for currency.

The History of these notes is given in SundayTimes of 2008 July 27th Don't stamp these out! by Ismath Raheem.
In 1977, Bevis Bawa, suggested that Laki Senanayake would be the ideal Artist to design notes for Bradbury Wilkinson, with a contract from Central Bank for a new set of currency. Laki used Ismath Raheem's Library with high quality hand printed nineteenth century natural history plates, to design the notes with Sri Lanka's rich wildlife endemic and unique flora and fauna set in the correct ecological niche. I was able to see the original collection of Paintings now with Dominic Sansoni.

I met Laki in 2019 November at his hideout near Dambulla called Diyabubula, to discuss the publication of a book on the artwork used for this most beautiful set of currency notes. He asked me to write a Numismatic article for it.
Shortly thereafter he sent me a gift of a 16x24 inch ceramic tile print of his painting of Two frogmouths in the Sinharaja Forest an image of which is displayed on right.
I was so sad to hear that Laki Senanayake has passed away in the morning of 2021 May 30th during the covid-19 pandamic. May he Rest In Peace.

The website lakisenanayake.com has images of 44 of his designs which had been painted at about 3 times the scale and had been scanned at 100 dpi. The images are displayed above at 25 dpi.
I thank Dominic Sansoni and Laki's daughter Mintaka for permission to use the images of these paintings in the notes.lakdiva.org.lk website.
I also thank Michael Meyler for corrections to the placement of the sketches and 3 additional sketches not in Laki's website.

If anyone owns or has an image of a Laki Senanayaka painting, used for one of the Sri Lanka 1979 Flora and Fauna Issue and not included in these webpages, please contribute digital image to kavanr @ gmail.com so that the painting is properly documented.