Auguste Borget at the Macao Museum of Art

Excellent news that Macao’s Museum of Art is hosting an exhibition dedicated to the work of Auguste Borget (more details on times, venue etc here). For many of us it is George Chinnery who we associate with portraits of Macao, but Borget was almost as equally prolific as well as painting Hong Kong and southern China. Just as Chinnery left London and Dublin so Borget left Paris and pitched up in China, in Canton (Guangzhou) in 1838. He remained in southern China for nearly a year and did indeed know Chinnery – the two went on sketching expeditions together.

Borget went on to visit Manila, Singapore and India before returning to Paris – Chinnery of course remained a lifelong ex-pat. His best works are gathered together in his 1842 book Sketches of China and the Chinese. Borget’s work is now scattered among private collections and museums in Hong Kong, France, Hawaii (where he also stopped and painted) and Singapore. If you can get to Macao the exhibition runs till October 9 this year.

Borget’s work, like Chinnery’s, give us a pre-photographic view of Hong Kong, Macao and southern China in close detail, a quite fantastic pictorial record of the place, people and times….