Arts

ONCE AGAIN GEORGE CHINNERY

Luís Sá Cunha

The bulk of Chinnery's drawings and paintings having been produced in Macao and being about the settlement and its native people it is imperative to print his unpublished works from the last decades of his life or those rarely reproduced.

A number of Chinnery's interesting works shown in public for the first time were brought to light by an important exhibition of his paintings which first took place in 1995 at the Centro Cultural de Belém (Belém Cultural Centre), Lisbon, organized by the Fundação Oriente (Orient Foundation). It was more recently opened at the Centro de Actividades Turísticas (Tourism Activities Centre) at the Fórum de Macau (Macao Forum), Macao, under the auspices of the Comissão Territorial de Macau para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses (The Macao Territorial Commission for the Commemoration of Portuguese Discoveries)

The exhibition was particularly pertinent to Macao in bringing back an unprecedented number of works from worldwide collections such as the Toyo Bunko, Tokyo, or The British Museum, London. We only regret the impossibility of incorporating in this unprecedented and highly important selection, Chinnery's works from the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

The exhibition made an interesting juxtaposition of Chinnery's academic oils, imbued with paysagistic romanticism, with, as was appropriately remarked, naturalistic panoramic drawings derived from Canaletto, with spontaneous, vibrant and lively tracery. For us, it is the artist's abundant in-loco pencil, crayon and ink sketches of everyday nineteenth-century Macao that, with perspicacity and immediacy, best transmit the contemporary scenery of the colony's full of movement, sound, colour and rhythms.

Chinnery's sketches within sketches catch images within images of the commedia del'arte of the native inhabitants of the metropolis with sharp authenticity and sui-generis intimism.

An exhaustive research of Chinnery's entire Macanese production is much needed but still awaited; not so much as a critical appraisal of its evolutionary aestheticism but as a repertoire of 'photographic realities' fundamental to a deeper knowledge of the town planning, architecture, anthropology and ethnography of this Portuguese settlement during the nineteenth century, where European and Chinese styles and mores confraternized harmoniously breaking new ground in international globalisation.

Besides being a humble homage to the greatest painter and draughstman of Macao, the purpose of this new compilation of Chinnery's artistic legacy is to provoke further research into the many as yet 'undecoded avenues' within its ambit — even at the direct level of amassed images of a bygone past stored up for the reader's nostalgic delight.

Self-Portrait

GEORGE CHINNERY(°1774-†1852)

Oil on canvas.780 x 520mm.

National Portrait Gallery. London.

In: HUTCHEON, Robin, Chinnery, Hong Kong

Note: Unless otherwise stated all following illustrations are reproduced from: George Chinnery: Imagens de Macau Oitocentista / George Chinnery: Images of Nineteenth-Century Macao, [Trilingual Exhibition Catalogue: 11 Out./Oct. -18 Nov., 1997 — Centro de Actividades Turísticas: Fórum de Macau / Tourist Activities Centre: Macao Forum], Macau, Comissão Territorial de Macau para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses / The Macao Territorial Commission for the Commemoration of Portuguese Discoveries, 1997 — abbreviated hereafter as [GC: INCM].

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