George Chinnery (; 5 January 1774 – 30 May 1852) was an English painter who spent most of his life in Asia, especially
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...
and
southern China
South China () is a geographical and cultural region that covers the southernmost part of China. Its precise meaning varies with context. A notable feature of South China in comparison to the rest of China is that most of its citizens are not n ...
.
Early life
Chinnery was born in
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
, where he studied at the Royal Academy Schools. His father was an exponent of the
Gurney
A stretcher, gurney, litter, or pram is an apparatus used for moving patients who require medical care. A basic type (cot or litter) must be carried by two or more people. A wheeled stretcher (known as a gurney, trolley, bed or cart) is often ...
system of shorthand; his elder brother William Chinnery owned what is now
Gilwell Park
Gilwell Park is a camp site and activity centre in East London located in the Sewardstonebury area of Waltham Abbey, within Epping Forest, near the border with Chingford. The site is owned by The Scout Association, is used by Scouting and Gu ...
in
Epping Forest
Epping Forest is a area of ancient woodland, and other established habitats, which straddles the border between Greater London and Essex. The main body of the forest stretches from Epping in the north, to Chingford on the edge of the London ...
in Essex, before he was discovered to have committed large-scale fraud, and fled to Sweden. George Chinnery moved in 1796 to Ireland, where he enjoyed some success as an artist, and married Marianne (née Vigne) on 19 April 1799 in
Dublin
Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...
.
Career
Chinnery returned to London in 1801 without his wife and two infant children. In 1802 he sailed to Madras (Chennai) on the ship . He established himself as a painter there and then in Calcutta (Kolkata), where he became the leading artist of the British community in India.
By 1813 Chinnery was a freemason, listed as a member of Calcutta's well-to-do masonic lodge ''Star in the East''. This was one of three masonic lodges in that city which took part in the official welcome for
Lord Moira (1754-1826), also a freemason, on his arrival there (1813) as the new Governor-General of India. Chinnery's masonic career is otherwise little documented, and its connection with his artistic output unexplored.
Some of his most famous paintings are of the Indian family of
Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick British Resident to the Nizam of Hyderabad who had set up home, to some scandal among his fellow Europeans, with the Indo-Iranian great niece of the Nizam of Hyderabad's chief minister. He painted ''The Kirkpatrick Children'' presenting them "
ith a
The Ith () is a ridge in Germany's Central Uplands which is up to 439 m high. It lies about 40 km southwest of Hanover and, at 22 kilometres, is the longest line of crags in North Germany.
Geography
Location
The Ith is immediatel ...
sympathy that is rare in
portraiture
A portrait is a painting, photograph, sculpture, or other artistic representation of a person, in which the face and its expressions are predominant. The intent is to display the likeness, personality, and even the mood of the person. For this r ...
of the period; the boy looking straight at the viewer with a self-conscious stance, hand on hip, while the girl looks uncomfortably at the floor." Mounting debt prompted a move in 1825 to southern China.
From 1825 until his death in 1852 Chinnery based himself in
Macau
Macau or Macao (; ; ; ), officially the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (MSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China in the western Pearl River Delta by the South China Sea. With a pop ...
,
but until 1832 he made regular visits to
Canton (now
Guangzhou
Guangzhou (, ; ; or ; ), also known as Canton () and alternatively romanized as Kwongchow or Kwangchow, is the capital and largest city of Guangdong province in southern China. Located on the Pearl River about north-northwest of Hong Kon ...
). He painted portraits of Chinese and Western merchants, visiting sea-captains, and their families resident in Macau. His work in oil paint was closely imitated by the Cantonese artist
Lam Qua
Lam Qua (; 1801–1860), or Kwan Kiu Cheong (), was a Chinese painter from the Canton province in Qing Dynasty China, who specialized in Western-style portraits intended largely for Western clients. Lam Qua was the first Chinese portrait painte ...
, who himself became a renowned portrait painter. Chinnery also painted landscapes (both in oils and in watercolours), and made numerous drawings of the people of Macau engaged in their daily activities.
In 1846 he made a six-month visit to
Hong Kong
Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China ( abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delt ...
, where he suffered from ill health but made detailed studies of the newly founded colony. He died in Macau on 30 May 1852 and is buried in the
Old Protestant Cemetery there.
Works
Apart from their artistic value, his paintings are historically valuable as he was the only western painter resident in
South China between the early and mid 19th century. He vividly depicted the life of ordinary people and the landscape of the
Pearl River Delta
The Pearl River Delta Metropolitan Region (PRD; ; pt, Delta do Rio das Pérolas (DRP)) is the low-lying area surrounding the Pearl River estuary, where the Pearl River flows into the South China Sea. Referred to as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Mac ...
at that period. Among the subjects of his portraits are the Scottish opium traders
William Jardine[ p.1]
Online version at Google books
/ref> and James Matheson
Sir James Nicolas Sutherland Matheson, 1st Baronet, FRS (17 November 179631 December 1878), was a Scottish Tai-Pan. Born in Shiness, Lairg, Sutherland, Scotland, he was the son of Captain Donald Matheson. He attended Edinburgh's Royal High Sc ...
as well as the diarist Harriet Low
Harriett Low Hillard (1877) was an American woman of letters and diarist. From 1829 to 1833 she lived in the Portuguese colony of Macau on the South China coast and she and her sickly aunt became the first American women to go to China. During he ...
.
George Chinnery learnt the Gurney system shorthand
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed and brevity of writing as compared to longhand, a more common method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek ''ste ...
from his father and grandfather (both writing-masters), and he used his own modified version of this shorthand for jotting quick notes on his pencil sketches.
Legacy
Substantial collections of Chinnery's drawings are to be found in London in the Victoria and Albert Museum
The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...
and the British Museum
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
; and in Salem, Mass., at the Peabody Essex Museum
The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts, US, is a successor to the East India Marine Society, established in 1799. It combines the collections of the former Peabody Museum of Salem (which acquired the Society's collection) and the ...
. Other notable groups are held in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, UK; the Hong Kong Museum of Art
The Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMoA) is the first and main art museum of Hong Kong, located in Salisbury Road, Tsim Sha Tsui. It is managed by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the Hong Kong Government. HKMoA has an art collection ...
; the Macau Museum; and the Macau Museum of Art. The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation
The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (), commonly known as HSBC (), was the parent entity of the multinational HSBC banking group until 1991, and is now its Hong Kong-based Asia-Pacific subsidiary. The largest bank in Hong K ...
can claim to have the outstanding corporate collection of Chinnery's works. Loan exhibitions of his pictures have been held recently in Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (1995); Metropolitan Teien Art Museum, Tokyo (1996); Hong Kong Museum of History, Hong Kong (2005); and Macau Museum (2010).
Chinnery was the basis for the artist Aristotle Quance in the James Clavell novel ''Tai-Pan
A tai-pan (,Andrew J. Moody, "Transmission Languages and Source Languages of Chinese Borrowings in English", ''American Speech'', Vol. 71, No. 4 (Winter, 1996), pp. 414-415. literally "top class"汉英词典 — ''A Chinese-English Dictionary' ...
''.
Gallery of works
File:Howqua, 1830.jpg, The Hong merchant Howqua
Wu Bingjian (; 17694 September 1843), trading as "Houqua" and better known in the West as "Howqua", was a hong merchant in the Thirteen Factories, head of the '' E-wo hong'' and leader of the Canton Cohong. He was once the richest man in the wor ...
, 1830, he was once one of the richest men in the world
File:Portrait of Thomas Beale - George Chinnety.JPG, Portrait of Thomas Beale
Thomas Beale (c. 1775–1841) was a Scottish naturalist, opium speculator and general merchant operating in the Far East during the 19th century.
Biography
Thomas was the younger brother of Daniel Beale and the cousin of Thomas Chaye Beale ...
, 1802-1803)
Catherine Sherson.jpg, Watercolour on ivory of Catherine Sherson, (born Taylor), 1802–03
File:Gilbert Elliot Murray-Kynynmond.jpg, Portrait of Gilbert Eliot, 1st Earl of Minto, (1811-1812)
File:Dr. Thomas Colledge with Patients.jpg, Thomas Richardson Colledge with patients (1833-1835)
Notes
References
*
* ''Impressions of the East - The Art of George Chinnery'', Hong Kong Museum of History, 2005
* Hutcheon, Robin, "Chinnery, the man and the legend," South China Morning Post Ltd, Hong Kong, 1975, with a chapter on Chinnery's shorthand by Geoffrey W. Bonsall.
* Tillotson, Giles, "Fan Kwae pictures: Paintings and drawings by George Chinnery and other artists in the collection of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation", 1987.
* Hutcheon, Robin, "Chinnery", Formasia Ltd, Hong Kong, 1989.
* Conner, Patrick, "George Chinnery 1774-1852, artist of India and the China Coast", ACC, 1989.
* Conner, Patrick, "The Flamboyant Mr Chinnery", catalogue of exhibition held at Asia House, London, 2012.
Further reading
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Chinnery, George
1774 births
1852 deaths
18th-century English painters
English male painters
19th-century English painters
Hong Kong art
Painters from London
Freemasons of the United Grand Lodge of England
19th-century English male artists
18th-century English male artists