88 pages, paperback 245x280
103 colour illustrations
ISBN 978 616 7339 12 2

Price $ 24.95

George Chinnery (1774-1852) spent almost all of his working life in the Far East: twenty-three years in India, then twenty-seven more on the China coast, where he lies buried. He never returned to his native London.

In Calcutta he became the leading artist of British India; in the

cosmopolitan cities of Canton, Macau and Hong Kong he became a legendary figure, portraying Chinese dignitaries, Parsi merchants, Western sea captains and their families. He also produced delicate watercolours of Bengal and Macau, and a wealth of lively sketches of the fishermen and boatwomen, the barbers, food-vendors and gamblers whom he encountered every day.

Chinnery, the ‘droll genius’, was a man of volatile temperament, high-spirited and depressive by turns – eccentric, extravagant, and hopelessly in debt for much of his life. He was valued as a wit, a raconteur, a ‘great observer of human nature’, and above all as an artist of great subtlety and panache.

Although celebrated to this day in Macau and Hong Kong, where some of his finest works are located, Chinnery has been largely forgotten in his country of birth. This catalogue accompanies the first major loan exhibition held in Britain for over fifty years.

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