George Chinnery

George Chinnery was a British painter and draughtsman whose career unfolded largely in Asia. Born in London in 1774 and trained at the Royal Academy schools, he travelled to India at the beginning of the nineteenth century and worked in Madras and Calcutta as a portraitist. Financial difficulties eventually contributed to his departure from British India, and in 1825 he settled in Macau, where he remained for most of the rest of his life while also visiting the trading enclave at Canton.

Chinnery painted European merchants, colonial officials and members of local communities, but his importance extends beyond formal portraiture. Thousands of drawings and watercolours record streets, boats, temples, labourers and everyday life around Macau and the Pearl River Delta before photography became common. His work therefore provides a valuable visual record of the region during the decades surrounding the expansion of British trade and the First Opium War. Chinnery died in Macau in 1852, leaving a large and widely dispersed body of work.

Amitav Ghosh’s River of Smoke places George Chinnery within the cosmopolitan world of Canton and Macau on the eve of the First Opium War. Chinnery’s historical career as a painter of merchants, officials, streets and waterfront life makes him a natural observer within a novel preoccupied with how the foreign trading community sees and represents China. His presence links the fictional merchants and travellers to the real expatriate culture of the Pearl River, where portraiture, botanical collecting, commerce and opium all circulate through the same restricted colonial spaces.