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Artist or Maker: George Chinnery (1774-1852) and Dr Thomas Boswall Watson (1815-1860)

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Provenance: Thomas Boswall Watson, and thence by descent to the present owner.

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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A LADY

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
The present gathering of Chinnery sketches includes both Bengal subjects from his Indian sojourn of 1802-1825 and Chinese sketches, mostly taken in an around Macao, from 1825-1852. Chinnery had arrived in Macao from India in September 1825. With excursions to Canton in the early years after his arrival and one six-month visit to Hong Kong in 1846, Macao became Chinnery's home (he lived just behind the Sao Lourenço Church, towards the end of the peninsula, at 8 rua de Ignacia Baptista) until his death, aged 78, in 1852. Living in a very small community of non-Chinese on the China Coast, he only survived through the generous patronage of the businessmen William Jardine and James Matheson, and the support of a handful of traders, tea tasters, doctors, missionaries and their families. For a rare intact Macao sketchbook (1836-37 and including over 200 sketches), from the collection of John Russell Reeves (1804-1877), East India Company Assistant Inspector of Teas at Canton, see Christie's, 13 July 2006, lot 100 (£332,800.)

The present group of sketches was collected by his doctor and pupil Thomas Boswall Watson, and includes a series of watercolours and sketches of Macao subjects by Watson. The Chinnery subjects are inscribed in the artist's shorthand, with dates and notes: a small pencil sketch of a family portrait, dated October 10 1816, is inscribed in shorthand 'Designed for Mrs Ross'; a sketch of a cow inscribed 'proportions right'; the large squared sketch of Tanka girls inscribed 'Filled in at home September 7th '42'; a study of an Indian inscribed 'Drapery white Turban purple'. For a detailed discussion of Chinnery's shorthand annotations on his drawings see G. Bonsall, 'Extracting the Poetry from the Prose: On reading Chinnery's Shorthand' in the exhibition catalogue Impressions of the East: The Art of George Chinnery , Hong Kong Museum of History and Hong Kong Museum of Art, June-August 2005, pp.22-35.

'As James Orange wrote, "Chinnery's heart was in sketching from nature", and in doing so almost every morning in Macau, he has left an unique record of the city's buildings, scenery, groups of Chinese people, boats and animals.' Geoffrey Bonsall, George Chinnery's Views of Macau , in Arts of Asia, Jan.-Feb. 1986, Vol. 16, No. 1, pp.89-92).

We are grateful to Geoffrey Bonsall for his translations of the shorthand annotations on the present sketches.