Portrait of William Jardine (1784-1843), full-length, seated, in a black coat, white waistcoat and trousers, his left arm resting on a table, before a red curtain, a landscape beyond

This portrait shows Chinnery’s most prominent patron, William Jardine, a wealthy merchant whom the artist had first met in Goa, India. When Jardine co-founded the eastern trade conglomerate Jardine, Matheson & Co., Chinnery was appointed the official painter to the firm, drawing on it for cash advances against future paintings. The merchant communities resident in Macau and trading in Canton proved a fruitful source of sitters for Chinnery, and Jardine proved instrumental in recommending clients for commissions. Although the artist’s true passion lay in landscape painting, portraiture provided a much-needed income that he could not earn from his rural landscapes or street scenes of local life.

Jardine’s initial training was in surgery in his native Scotland; after earning a diploma from the Royal Colleague of Surgeons in Edinburgh in 1802, he signed up as a surgeon’s mate on the East India Company’s HCS Brunswick. On his first voyage to the East, he was to discover that trading in opium and other commodities was far more profitable than practicing medicine. The East India Company at that time held a monopoly on British trade with the Far East, granted by the Crown; they controlled the opium trade but contracted out its transport to independent traders, and Jardine left the Company to take advantage of this policy in 1817.

In 1832, Jardine co-founded Jardine, Matheson & Co., in partnership with fellow Scotsman James Matheson (1796-1878). They skilfully navigated the complex web of trade restrictions laid down by the Chinese government and its Viceroy whilst remaining amicable with the East India Company. By the time the latter's trade monopoly was terminated in 1833, Jardine, Matheson & Co. was in a prime position to grow into the largest British trading Hong in Asia. In this painting, Chinnery’s own view of the British Hongs on the waterfront at Canton hangs on the wall behind Jardine. The firm enjoyed success from its export of tea, cotton, silk and other basic commodities, but also, alongside many of the western merchants, in the trading of opium. In the West at that time, opium was legal and considered relatively safe; in China, demand was strong but its import was prohibited, which the British merchants viewed as an affront to the principles of free trade.

Despite Jardine’s prestigious standing in the merchant community, only a handful of portraits of him have survived, at least two of them by Chinnery (including the present work) and others by his Chinese imitators. There is another version of this portrait, probably a copy by Lamqua, in the Jardine Collection, for which see M. Keswick, (ed.), The Thistle and the Jade: A Celebration of 150 Years of Jardine, Matheson & Co., London, 1982, p. 8 (illustrated).