Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) was a Sri Lankan-English art historian and philosopher, a pioneer of the comparative study of Indian arts and world religions. His encyclopaedic works — including Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists, Hinduism and Buddhism and The Transformation of Nature in Art — made the treasures of Indian art and its metaphysics known to the modern world.

Coomaraswamy served as first Keeper of Indian art at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, building one of the great collections of Indian sculpture and painting. A sculptor of modernists and a major figure in the Perennialist school, he argued that traditional art embodies a universal spiritual teaching, and remains a foundational theorist of craft, beauty and myth.