Article:
The colonial perspective
By Victoria Finlay
South China Morning Post - 2012

English painter George Chinnery once called himself 'the ugliest man on the China coast' yet the first major show of his paintings in London for 50 years, on at Asia House, is a splendid portrait of the man, as unsentimental as its subject.

The show is full of insight into what life was like in India and on the China coast, not only for a colonial visitor but for residents as well. Titled 'The Flamboyant Mr Chinnery', it sets out to portray the artist's eccentric, ambitious, debt-ridden, possibly bipolar, yet sometimes incredibly gifted life.

We meet him first as a young man in England and then Ireland, learning his trade with his first sketches. The exhibition then traces his life as an expatriate in India and southern China, perfecting the drawings of the streets, the portraits of the local characters, and the landscapes and seascapes for which he became known.

'He left England in 1802, when he was a young man, and never went back,' the exhibition's curator Patrick Conner says. 'Which was unusual - most young men went and returned, but Chinnery ran desperately into debt.'

He had two children in Ireland, but within two years he left them and his wife to go to India. It was not unusual for men to leave for the colonies in advance of their families, but Chinnery's family took nearly 20 years to join him. His daughter Matilda married in India and his son, John, died of a fever aged 20, a few months after arriving.

Chinnery never made up with his wife Marianne; it could not have helped that he had two more children in 1813 with his Indian mistress.

By then he was famous. One of the more unusual pieces is a picture of the young son and daughter of Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick (the White Mughal) and his Persian wife Khair-un-Nissa, great-niece of the Nizam's chief minister. The picture was done shortly before they left for school in England and Kirkpatrick would have commissioned only a highly regarded artist for such a task.

He was not the only one wanting a Chinnery portrait; having a portrait painted by Chinnery was the ambition of every cadet soldier and East India Company civil servant in early 19th-century India, and later Macau. Nevertheless, despite all these commissions, the artist was appalling at managing his money. In 1821, he was forced to move to the Danish settlement of Serampore in today's West Bengal, where English civil law did not apply, just so he could not be pursued by the bailiffs.

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Image:
George Chinnery - Self Portrait, c.1840
By George Chinnery

Oil on canvas

Collection: National Portrait Gallery, London