George Chinnery (1774-1852) was an English painter who spent almost the whole of his working life in Asia, becoming the leading Western artist first in British India and later in southern China, and remains today one of the most historically significant painters to have documented the world of the East India trade. Born in London, he trained at the Royal Academy Schools, where J.M.W. Turner was a contemporary, before moving to Dublin in 1796, marrying there in 1799, and sailing alone for Madras in 1802 to seek portrait commissions, leaving his wife and two young children behind. He went on to settle in Calcutta in 1812, establishing himself as the pre-eminent Western portrait painter in British India, though he fell increasingly, and for reasons that remain unclear, into serious debt.
To escape his creditors, Chinnery sailed for the China coast in 1825, settling in the Portuguese enclave of Macau, the only part of China at that time permitted to host a resident foreign community, and making regular visits until 1832 to the trading port of Canton, seventy miles away, where European merchants were required to conduct their business. He remained in Macau for the rest of his life, never returning to England, and became closely associated with the European, American and Chinese merchant community there, painting portraits of leading figures including the traders William Jardine and James Matheson, founders of the great trading house of Jardine Matheson, and the wealthy Chinese merchant Howqua. Beyond formal portrait commissions, Chinnery made countless sketches and watercolours of everyday life in Macau and Canton, rising early to record street scenes, barbers, blacksmiths and porters with a curiosity and immediacy that give his work lasting documentary as well as artistic value; he witnessed and recorded the Opium Wars and the earliest days of the British colony at Hong Kong, which he visited in 1846. His technique in oils was closely imitated by the Cantonese painter Lam Qua, who became a celebrated portraitist in his own right.
The painting by Chinnery held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, a landscape with a goat in a mountainous river setting, represents a less familiar but genuine facet of an artist whose reputation rests chiefly on his portraiture and his uniquely detailed record of European life on the China coast, offering a rare example of his landscape practice within the gallery's broader holdings of British art with international and colonial-era subject matter.