GEORGE CHINNERY WAS extravagant, gregarious and a dinner-party raconteur. If he'd had a half-decent accountant, or liked his wife better, then Macau and Hong Kong may never have known this influential 19th-century European artist.
Chinnery displayed his earliest works at London's Royal Academy of Arts, at the age of 17. He died in Macau in 1852 at the age of 78 and rests in the Protestant Cemetery.
But Chinnery left behind much more than a gravestone. Apart from debts, he left hundreds of oils, watercolours and sketches. They're impressive in the way he forged his own style, and as a chronicle of Macau and the Far East, and the people he came into contact with in the first half of the 19th century.
To celebrate the 180th anniversary of Chinnery's arrival in Macau, the Hong Kong Museum of History is staging the city's largest exhibition of his work. About 180 works will be on display, including 70 from HSBC's extensive collection, paintings and sketches from the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts and pieces from private collectors.
'He was an extraordinarily flamboyant figure - an up-and-down artist who would take risks that sometimes worked and at other times didn't,' says British art historian Patrick Conner, who has written a book on Chinnery and helped put the exhibition together. 'He was also a wonderful draftsman who could draw figures. He learnt shorthand from his father and on some of the sketches you can see where he wrote what was right and what was wrong.'
Chinnery made a living as an artist by painting portraits in India and later in Macau. Chief curator Joseph Ting Sun-pao says he made his name with a portrait of the Kirkpatrick children, the daughter and son of an expatriate administrator and his Indian princess wife (recently depicted in William Dalrymple's White Mughals). The detail in the portrait of two Eurasian children in traditional Indian dress is remarkable.