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An outstanding group of paintings and drawings by George Chinnery Spanning several decades, the notable group of works by George Chinnery shown here illustrates the diverse talents of that remarkable man. Unlike most young Europeans who travelled eastwards in search of novel and ‘exotic’ subject matter, Chinnery was the man who never returned. Having embarked for Madras (Chennai) in 1802 at the age of 28, he remained in India for 23 years and then decamped to the China coast, where he lived—to the astonishment of all—for a further 27 years. His towering monument presides over the Protestant cemetery in Macau, with a plaque and trilingual inscription added in 1974, two centuries after his birth. Chinnery’s art changed direction several times during the course of his long career. At the age of 18, he enrolled at the Royal Academy Schools in London, having already begun to exhibit his portrait miniatures in the Royal Academy. After moving to Dublin in 1796, he expanded his repertoire to include larger portraits and landscapes on canvas; his five years in Ireland (and his Irish wife) led to the rumour—which he seems to have encouraged—that he was an Irishman. A Romantic artist in India In Madras, —where his brother John was employed by the East India Company, —Chinnery turned his hand to any artistic project that might advance his career. These included a series of etchings, portrait miniatures, oils, drawings, sketches of Hindu and Islamic architecture, European colonial buildings and the durbar of the Nawab Azim-ud-Daula. His major work from this period is the celebrated and unsettling over-life-size portrait of the Kirkpatrick children, about to be sent away to England but still dressed in the gold-fringed robes of the Hyderabad court. Few watercolours by Chinnery from this period survive, but those that do (including the two seen here) are in a freely-handled style; foreground figures and architectural features are suggested by dashes, dots and quick strokes—a style closer to Thomas Girtin and some his English contemporaries of the 1790s than to the more careful and detailed work of his later years. It was only in Calcutta (Kolkata), in the second decade of the 19th century, that Chinnery established himself as the leading artist in British India. His income was derived almost entirely from portraiture, and he received lucrative commissions from judges, officers, merchants and governors-general. Yet he had no desire to be limited to portraiture; ‘he likes landscape painting a thousand times better than portrait painting’, reported Lady Harriet Paget, wife of the commander-in-chief. In the countryside near Calcutta, Chinnery found a fresh source of subjects. While his contemporaries travelled through Britain in search of crumbling abbeys and fallen columns, preferably overgrown with ivy, Chinnery—driven by the same impulse—took his sketchbook to the villages of Bengal, where he drew the precarious banglas with thatched roofs awry, dilapidated brickwork and ruinous tombs which were quickly overgrown in the tropical climate. He was no less in thrall to the Romantic Movement than Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lawrence, Turner and Constable, all born within five years of George Chinnery himself. Success, debt, and escape to China Despite his considerable earnings in Calcutta, Chinnery contrived—for reasons that remain unclear—to become indebted on a massive scale. In 1814 he wrote to the 1st Earl of Minto, the outgoing governor-general who had been the artist’s friend and patron, for assistance to the tune of £7,500 or £8,000 ‘to settle me in England’. Minto died before he was able to receive the letter. Having tried every other means to evade his creditors, Chinnery sailed to the China coast, arriving in Macau in 1825. In Macau (and in Canton, which he visited on several occasions), he found, once again, a fresh range of pictorial themes. This new merchant community contained a smaller but more diverse group of potential sitters for his portraits: Americans, Chinese, Europeans and Parsis. A study for a portrait of one of the Cantonese ‘Hong merchants’ is included here. Among the British merchants, the most influential figure was William Jardine, whose seated portrait is seen here: behind a desk piled with ledgers and inkwells is a framed picture of the Canton trading bases known as ‘Factories’, in which Jardine played a dominant role. Long after Chinnery had left India, William Jardine and his partner James Matheson continued to assist the elderly artist, making payments on his behalf to the artist’s Calcutta creditors, who continued to press their claims. Although Chinnery might never have come to the China coast had it not been for his debts, it transpired that the streets and beaches of Macau offered him a plethora of new subjects: market vendors, boat people, gamblers and game-players, blacksmiths, travelling barbers and stonemasons, together with the Portuguese-built forts and Jesuit churches of the city. He began to draw obsessively, making repeated studies—of clasped hands for example, the prow of a boat, or the angle at which a barber attended to his customer—to satisfy his own increasingly high standards. Beside his pencil sketches, he added notes in the shorthand he had learned from his father, to remind himself of any special features or improvements that might be required. Although he often returned to his favourite themes, they would be freshly considered and sketched on each occasion. Chinnery prided himself on going out each morning and making one or two new studies before he allowed himself to return for breakfast. Of particular interest were the Tanka boats: small covered crafts with semi-circular covers of bamboo and rattan which might be dragged up the shore and adapted for use as dwellings in many ingenious ways. They provided a rich source of material for Chinnery, who depicted these boat-dwellings together with the boatwomen in their red headscarves, their children, and their cooking stoves. In Macau, Chinnery also developed a quite different genre of picture-making, of which several examples feature in this group: small oil sketches, artfully composed with a minimum of detail, in which groups of figures stand or crouch together at street corners—not individuals so much as archetypes, reminding us perhaps of the stooping figures later conceived by Jean-François Millet. Painted in muted shades of blue, brown and off-white, they are the work of a versatile artist who, for all his emphasis on small-scale precision in pencil and pen, could also stand back from his subject and view it as—he insisted—every artist should: ‘with a poet’s eye’.

GEORGE CHINNERY (1774-1852)

A Hong merchant, seated in an interior

Details

GEORGE CHINNERY (1774-1852)
A Hong merchant, seated in an interior
pencil on paper
6 3/4 x 4 3/8 in. (17.2 x 11.1 cm.)

Provenance

David Villiers.
with Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, London, where purchased, November 1973.

Special notice

This lot has been imported from outside of the UK for sale and placed under the Temporary Admission regime. Import VAT is payable at 5% on the hammer price. VAT at 20% will be added to the buyer’s premium but will not be shown separately on our invoice.

Conditions of sale

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