Chinnery at Asia House – A London Must

I’m off to London in December and you can bet that one of my first stops (after a reviving pint of Fuller’s London Pride and then a Gregg’s pasty or three) will be to Asia House to see their Chinnery exhibition, which runs until January 12th next year. I have long loved Mr Chinnery, both the man and his work – a loveable and forever indebted rogue who deserted the wife in India, bolt holed in Macau, knew everyone, painted most of them and got up to all sorts. And the work is amazing; without Chinnery we would be substantially poorer in our knowledge of the everyday life and folk of Macao and the Canton Factories as well as early Hong Kong. If this period at the very start of the Anglo-Chinese trade lives for us at all then it is in the terms and colours that Chinnery painted for us (not least the self-portraits of his own rather ugly but mischievous looking mug).  It is also worth noting that this is the first major exhibition of Chinnery’s work in Britain for over 50 years (though several years ago Hong Kong had a rather good Chinnery exhibition that unlocked some of his work – much of which came courtesy of the likes of HSBC and Jardines, unsurprisingly!!).

The exhibition, The Flamboyant Mr Chinnery (1774-1852): An English Artist in India and China, should be good. I’ve never been so interested in the India stuff, simply because there were so many other artists at work there compared to Macao, Canton and Hong Kong. Chinnery may be slightly overlooked as he left early and never returned – come back to London with your pictures and tall tales of the East and you may have been feted but Chinnery remained in the East and died there. I’m not qualified to say if Chinnery was a great artist or not (though he did have a secret code language he wrote in which is rather fascinating) I’m into the subject matter and period rather than brush stroke and technique to be honest. More after I’ve spent some time with Chinnery in London.

A Macao street, courtesy of Chinnery