George Chinnery: 1774-1852 : Artist of India and the China Coast

Abstract

Among British artists George Chinnery is a special case. Having left Britain at the age of twenty-eight, he spent the last fifty years of his life on the other side of the world - twenty-three of them in India, twenty-seven on the China coast. If he had remained in Britain, or even in Europe, he would probably have been caught up in the changing fashions of art and taste, allying himself with one coterie or another. As it was, he forfeited all the achievements that would no doubt have been his, by spending the great majority of his working life in the Far East, and much of it in a small community of western expatriates. Yet Chinnery was a talented and brilliant artist, a portrait and landscape painter, often working in miniature, he painted industriously, producing many portraits of the western community in which he lived, as well as of local personalities and scenes of eastern life, working in all media. He would, it has been said, have been an equal of Lawrence and Beechey had he not travelled so far afield. In this original and well-researched book, Patrick Conner has looked behind the myths that up around George Chinnery's name, and put both his life and artistic talent in their true perspectives. This is a highly readable and academic study of an artist whose work has often been unjustly underappreciated, and is generously illustrated with a wide range of works.

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