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The Flamboyant Mr Chinnery (1774-1852): An English Artist in India and China

The Flamboyant Mr Chinnery (1774-1852): An English Artist in India and China is a loan exhibition held at Asia House in London from 4 November 2011 to 21 January 2012, writes Patrick Conner (EAR print edition issue 78).

In the song made famous by the Kingston Trio in 1959, 'the man who never returned' was doomed, for the want of a nickel, to ride for ever on the Boston MTA.  More than a century before him, George Chinnery was likewise doomed, for the want of several thousand pounds, to remain in the Far East, unable to pay his debts - let alone the passage home to Britain.

Thus Chinnery spent the last fifty years of his life in the Far East.  Only two public loan exhibitions of Chinnery's work have been held in Britain, the land of his birth - one at the Tate Gallery in 1932, and one at the Arts Council's London gallery (and also in Edinburgh) in 1957.  Since then there have been substantial exhibitions of his work in Lisbon (1995), Tokyo (1996), Hong Kong (2005) and recently in Macau (2010), all with bi- or trilingual catalogues.

Now at last Asia House is staging a loan exhibition of Chinnery's art, the first in Britain for over fifty years.  As a charitable organisation Asia House lacks some of the in-house resources and staff which a museum might call upon in organising an exhibition such as this; fortunately this project has been generously supported by a dozen enthusiasts, enabling Asia House to secure loans from several national institutions (British Museum, British Library, V&A, National Portrait Gallery) as well as private collections, some of them in Hong Kong - notably that of HSBC, the principal sponsor.

It is hoped that more exhibitions of this kind may be held in Asia House's galleries.  The subject of its initial show was 'The Tiger', and although one cannot claim that Chinnery ranged in Asia quite as widely as that endangered animal, the artist did spend no fewer than twenty-three years in India and then twenty-seven more on the China coast.  Unlike those 'orientalist' painters who paid short visits to Egypt, Palestine or Asia Minor, and then returned to furnish the Royal Academy's walls with exotic scenes for many years afterwards, Chinnery spent two-thirds of his long life in the Far East; he died in Macau in 1852, aged 78, and he would be pleased to know - as a man who did not underestimate his abilities - that his grand tombstone has pride of place in Macau's Protestant cemetery.

There are contradictory elements in Chinnery's career which the exhibition aims to encompass.  On the one hand we may see him as an artist intimately associated with colonial power, who portrayed the administrators and generals of British India with all the trappings of office.  But the artist appears a very different figure in his latter days on the south China coast, a fugitive from his creditors, paying no rent in his latter years; he continued to paint portraits when commissions could be found, but increasingly he turned his hand to sketches, watercolours and small landscapes in oils, pictures which many today might regard as his most appealing work.

Perhaps fortunately, the purpose-built gallery at Asia House cannot properly accommodate a series of full-length formal portraits of commanders-in-chief, judges and governors-general.  A comprehensive Chinnery show would however include his portrait of Dr Colledge in his surgery with his Chinese assistant (now in the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.).  Room would also be found for one of his full-scale portraits of William Jardine, and perhaps for the ceremonial portrait of Henry Russell, Chief Justice of Bengal, which was last seen in a crumbling state in Calcutta in the 1970s.   These portraits are shown now in their engraved form, as is the famous painting of Robert Morrison and his Chinese assistants engaged in translating the Bible, which was destroyed in the Pantechnicon fire of 1874.  Another painting apparently 'lost' (and seen here in lithograph) is that of the multilingual missionary Karl Gützlaff, who was persuaded to lend his linguistic skills to Jardine's coastal opium vessels, assisting the captains as a translator while himself distributing missionary tracts.  (Although opposed to the trade in opium, proscribed in China, Gutzlaff maintained that Christianity would be well served by opening up China to Western trade.)

The exhibition does however include one extraordinary larger-than-life portrait, which since the publication of William Dalrymple's book White Mughals is probably Chinnery's most celebrated work.  This is the portrait of the splendidly-attired young children of Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick, Resident at the court of Hyderabad, and his Indo-Persian wife Khair un-Nissa.  Executed in 1805, the painting is on one level a testament to a culture (one which all but vanished during Chinnery's lifetime) in which such inter-racial marriages were tolerated, even encouraged.  On another, it elicits the viewers' sympathy for the plight of the girl and boy, aged three and four.  As children of a well-to-do Englishman in India they were about to be sent back to Britain, to be baptised, re-named and given a British education.  They would not see their parents again.  Dalrymple sees 'an expression of infinite sadness and vulnerability on [the girl's] face, her little eyes dark and swollen with crying'; the visitor to the exhibition may decide that the girl's expression owes more to the mannerisms of the artist than to her sorrow at the prospect of separation.

This portrait did much to establish Chinnery's reputation in Calcutta, where in time he became the principal painter of the British Raj.  The front cover of the exhibition catalogue shows the artist in flamboyant mode as he appeared in the mock-heroic poem Tom Raw, the Griffin, painting the portrait of a young officer who had learned that a visit to Chinnery's studio was an essential stage in one's progress through the ranks of Calcutta society.

Successful as he was, Chinnery's life was plagued by debt.  He was no doubt a man of extravagant habits, but his debts - like those of his mentor and near-contemporary Sir Thomas Lawrence - have never been explained in any detail.  'I cannot think what keeps him so poor', King George IV is reported to have said of Lawrence, although it was common gossip that 'he was kept poor by great generosity to women'.[i]  Something similar might have been said of Chinnery, whose marital difficulties were legendary, and who fathered two illegitimate sons by an Indian mother in addition to the two children he left behind in Ireland.

In 1821 Chinnery fled from Calcutta to the nearby Danish settlement of Serampore, where English civil law did not apply.  Finally he took ship to the China coast, hoping to escape from his creditors, or - as he preferred to say - from his wife, who had followed him to India after an interval of sixteen years.

During his first few years on the China coast Chinnery was a regular visitor to the Western 'hongs' or 'factories' outside the city walls of Canton (Guangzhou), where the European and North American merchants lived during the trading season.  It was here that he painted two of his most influential portraits, both on view in the exhibition: those of the Chinese 'hong merchants' Howqua and Mowqua.  These were leading figures in the 'co-hong', the group of Chinese merchants with whom the Westerners were obliged to deal.  Both are portrayed by Chinnery amid a variety of symbols of status and taste - porcelain teabowl, incense-burner, official hat, and in the case of Mowqua a large glass bowl (imported from Europe perhaps?) containing a pair of flickering goldfish.

The 'hong merchants' had been portrayed before, by Cantonese artists working in a Westernised manner for Western clients; but now Chinnery presented them in the grand manner of Regency portraiture, with dramatic contrasts of light and shade, thundery sky in the distance, and the sitters themselves depicted in a relaxed posture that would have seemed shockingly informal to their compatriots.  Yet these two paintings gave rise to quantities of similar portraits, skilfully painted in Chinnery's manner by the Chinese 'export' artists, which found their way back to the West in the nineteenth century.  The two portraits by Chinnery were bought in 1924 by the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, and are the founding pictures in what is now HSBC's outstanding collection of works related to the China trade -

When the trading season at Canton was over many of the Western merchants decamped to Macau.  Chinnery's last visit to Canton was in 1832; after that he seems to have lived in Macau permanently, apart from a six-month visit in 1846 to the newly-colonised island of Hong Kong.  Asia House lists 'cultural interaction' high up on its webpage, and Macau in Chinnery's day was a place which for nearly three centuries had made cultural interaction its raison d'être.  Here the Portuguese, and others who joined them from Japan, Goa, Timor and elsewhere, were allowed to live, trade, intermarry, and lease their properties to merchants from Europe and north America.  Chinnery seems to have thrived in this cosmopolitan community.  On the last night of his life he was kept company by three old friends - Kentucky-born William Hunter, Patrick Stewart from Scotland, and Hirjibhoy Rustomji, one of the Parsi community which was played a major part in the China trade; Chinnery's pencil drawing of Hirjibhoy is in the exhibition.

Despite his confinement to a few small outposts on the China coast, Chinnery's move to China brought something of an artistic liberation.  What he forfeited in freedom of movement he gained from the discovery of a wealth of new material close at hand: the Chinese people around him, and their daily activities.  Fishermen, porters, boatwomen, blacksmiths, food vendors, gamblers, travelling barbers, not to mention the dogs, cats and low-slung pigs that seem to have roamed the streets of Macau - these were the inspiration for his animated sketches, in pencil, pen and ink, and sometimes in oils.  He made a habit of rising and making several sketches each day before breakfast.  Occasionally we see a priest, a Portuguese soldier, a Parsi merchant or a tall-hatted Westerner, but it is above all the life of the Chinese people that we see in Chinnery's compelling little sketches.

And why the title?  Was Chinnery always 'flamboyant'?  He was indeed renowned for his bohomie, his dinner-table wit, his huge appetite, and his theatrical gestures; even in his seventies he was reported to be 'in great spirits - sang two songs after dinner'.[ii]   Yet he was also liable to moods in which he was 'melancholy and dejected to the greatest degree', as noted by the diarist William Hickey in Calcutta.[iii]  Commentators of a later century would have placed Chinnery firmly in the category of manic-depressive.  Nevertheless it was the extravert side of his character that has been remembered by most of those who encountered him, and also in the several historical novels which have revived the legend of Chinnery the effusive, philandering genius: Tai-Pan (1966) by James Clavell (1966), An Insular Possession by Timothy Mo (1986), Chinnery in China by Katherine Odell (1971).  Most recently River of Smoke by Amitav Ghosh (2011), currently heading the list of best-selling fiction in India, gives a prominent (albeit imaginary) role to one of George Chinnery's half-Indian sons plays a as a gay Eurasian artist and an acute observer of the 1839 'opium crisis'.

Notes

[i] See Thomas Lawrence, Regency Power and Brilliance, ed. A.C. Atkinson, P. Funnell and L. Feltz, 2010, passim; and The Croker Papers, ed. Louis J. Jennings, 1884, vol. 2, 133 and 135.

[ii] Thomas Boswall Watson (Chinnery's friend and doctor), 'Memoir of the family of Watson' (Watson family collection), entry for 3 November 1847

[iii] Memoirs of William Hickey, 1745-1809, ed. Alfred Spencer, 1913-25, vol.4, 385

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