George Chinnery

George Chinnery was a British painter who worked for most of his career in India and the Chinese port cities of Macau and Canton. He produced portraits, landscapes and sketches that preserve detailed views of merchants, officials, labourers and streets in the early nineteenth-century trading world. Persistent debt encouraged his move from Calcutta to Macau, where he became an influential teacher and observer. His work is now an important visual record of colonial and Chinese coastal society.

Chinnery appears in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy, especially River of Smoke, which recreates the foreign trading community at Canton and uses the visual world associated with his sketches. Historical fiction can employ him as an observer able to cross social settings while still remaining part of the privileged expatriate community. His pictures offer novelists concrete details of places later transformed or destroyed.