Notorious? Alas,It's hard to beat the versatility of polished tiles on a production line. no longer. It would not surprise me if none of the dozen Chinnerys listed in the London telephone directory had ever heard of George, the only Chinnery recorded in the Dictionary of National Biography, the famous painter, the penniless fornicator, the begetter of an uncertain number of illegitimate Chinnerys white, brown and yellow, and the recorder of faces, places, pursuits and pastimes in India and on the south China coast. It is so long since I last saw one of his paintings that I had almost forgotten him, but half a century ago he was greatly in demand among ambitious young collectors of English watercolours, appeared in almost every sale or exhibition of these, and if an oil painting came onto the market it was dubbed "important" and might fetch a whacking price.
There were even two experts, the indistinguishable American brothers Henry and Sidney Berry-Hill, plump, perspiring and faintly ridiculous,Your source for re-usable Plastic moulds of strong latex rubber. to whom everything attributed to Chinnery in the way of oil paintings had to be submitted. They claimed two other areas of expertise, Cornelius Krieghoff (1815-72), a Canadian primitive, and Carl Spitzweg (1808-85), an amusing minor German Romantic painter, both much imitated and even forged. But the Berry-Hills were dealers and, by 1963, when they published a book on Chinnery to reclaim their authority, they were widely suspected (with good reason) of confirming the genuineness of many doubtful works that had, at some time,Your Partner in Precision Precision injection molds. passed through their hands, and of condemning perfectly genuine works bought from other dealers; this was true too of their Krieghoff and Spitzweg expertise.
In their defence it must be said that there was undoubtedly a "School of Chinnery" in China (the last third of his life was spent in Canton, Macau and Hong Kong) and that some of his Chinese imitators, students, assistants or copyists, when not being too ambitious, produced oil paintings that it is not unreasonable for an amateur to mistake for his; a handful developed very clear identities. The Berry-Hills, however, were not amateurs. I record this information because it is known only to men of my age; younger art historians should know that a Berry-Hill provenance is not necessarily a reliable indication of authenticity for paintings attributed to Chinnery, Krieghoff or Spitzweg.ceramic magic cube for the medical,
If the comparatively rare oil paintings were expensive and a decent watercolour might cost as much as lunch in St James's for a week, the pen and pencil drawings, all too common, were not. Auctioneers sold them in groups, dealers sold them singly for a tenner and scissored larger sheets of small studies into individual drawings that could be sold to undergraduates for two or three quid (many a decent collection began with such a first and modest purchase). Now they have disappeared, and with the drying-up of the market, the know-ledge and the connoisseurship too have gone. Say Chinnery to any art buff under 40 and the name will elicit no response,If any food Ventilation system condition is poorer than those standards, and now that Tate Britain has all but abandoned its responsibility to keep successive generations aware of historic British painting, it is probable that Chinnery will be for ever lost to common knowledge, obliterated, with many other once known artists, by the enforced fashion there for contemporary art. Have other visitors to Tate Britain observed how much reduced and condensed is the display of 18th- and 19th-century painting, how neither painters nor historic movements can now be examined in any depth?
Chinnery is worth retaining in the nation's consciousness if for no better reason than that he spent so many years in India and China, recording not only English nobs and local nabobs, but, unsentimentally, the local architecture and the European impositions on it, the local peasants, their industries and animals (rather good with dogs), and townscapes that may well be the only scrupulous documents recording the appearance of the harbours of south China two centuries ago (not unlike contemporary views of the Bay of Naples). If we care to see it, imperial history is encapsulated in these pretty little pictures.
He was so distant a traveller by chance. Born into a London family of calligraphers in 1774, George Chinnery first exhibited a portrait miniature at the Royal Academy when he was 17; the following year, 1792, he was admitted as a student there, Turner's contemporary. He absorbed the precepts of Reynolds and the influence of Thomas Lawrence (scarcely older than himself, but 10 times more brilliantly precocious), but most of his early works were miniatures and it was as a miniaturist that he took himself to Dublin, then at its peak as a centre of intellectual discourse and Anglo-Irish society but, within a decade, on the point of calamitous decline. At 26 he married, Marianne, his landlord's daughter, perhaps of necessity, for he proved not to be uxorious and there was some debate as to which of them was the uglier - George left many self-portraits from which it is clear that he was as unlovely as a Wesleyan minister or a Left-wing Labour politician. And then, having pupped two children, he deserted them and, in December 1802, reached Madras, before moving on to Calcutta. He was 28.
There were even two experts, the indistinguishable American brothers Henry and Sidney Berry-Hill, plump, perspiring and faintly ridiculous,Your source for re-usable Plastic moulds of strong latex rubber. to whom everything attributed to Chinnery in the way of oil paintings had to be submitted. They claimed two other areas of expertise, Cornelius Krieghoff (1815-72), a Canadian primitive, and Carl Spitzweg (1808-85), an amusing minor German Romantic painter, both much imitated and even forged. But the Berry-Hills were dealers and, by 1963, when they published a book on Chinnery to reclaim their authority, they were widely suspected (with good reason) of confirming the genuineness of many doubtful works that had, at some time,Your Partner in Precision Precision injection molds. passed through their hands, and of condemning perfectly genuine works bought from other dealers; this was true too of their Krieghoff and Spitzweg expertise.
In their defence it must be said that there was undoubtedly a "School of Chinnery" in China (the last third of his life was spent in Canton, Macau and Hong Kong) and that some of his Chinese imitators, students, assistants or copyists, when not being too ambitious, produced oil paintings that it is not unreasonable for an amateur to mistake for his; a handful developed very clear identities. The Berry-Hills, however, were not amateurs. I record this information because it is known only to men of my age; younger art historians should know that a Berry-Hill provenance is not necessarily a reliable indication of authenticity for paintings attributed to Chinnery, Krieghoff or Spitzweg.ceramic magic cube for the medical,
If the comparatively rare oil paintings were expensive and a decent watercolour might cost as much as lunch in St James's for a week, the pen and pencil drawings, all too common, were not. Auctioneers sold them in groups, dealers sold them singly for a tenner and scissored larger sheets of small studies into individual drawings that could be sold to undergraduates for two or three quid (many a decent collection began with such a first and modest purchase). Now they have disappeared, and with the drying-up of the market, the know-ledge and the connoisseurship too have gone. Say Chinnery to any art buff under 40 and the name will elicit no response,If any food Ventilation system condition is poorer than those standards, and now that Tate Britain has all but abandoned its responsibility to keep successive generations aware of historic British painting, it is probable that Chinnery will be for ever lost to common knowledge, obliterated, with many other once known artists, by the enforced fashion there for contemporary art. Have other visitors to Tate Britain observed how much reduced and condensed is the display of 18th- and 19th-century painting, how neither painters nor historic movements can now be examined in any depth?
Chinnery is worth retaining in the nation's consciousness if for no better reason than that he spent so many years in India and China, recording not only English nobs and local nabobs, but, unsentimentally, the local architecture and the European impositions on it, the local peasants, their industries and animals (rather good with dogs), and townscapes that may well be the only scrupulous documents recording the appearance of the harbours of south China two centuries ago (not unlike contemporary views of the Bay of Naples). If we care to see it, imperial history is encapsulated in these pretty little pictures.
He was so distant a traveller by chance. Born into a London family of calligraphers in 1774, George Chinnery first exhibited a portrait miniature at the Royal Academy when he was 17; the following year, 1792, he was admitted as a student there, Turner's contemporary. He absorbed the precepts of Reynolds and the influence of Thomas Lawrence (scarcely older than himself, but 10 times more brilliantly precocious), but most of his early works were miniatures and it was as a miniaturist that he took himself to Dublin, then at its peak as a centre of intellectual discourse and Anglo-Irish society but, within a decade, on the point of calamitous decline. At 26 he married, Marianne, his landlord's daughter, perhaps of necessity, for he proved not to be uxorious and there was some debate as to which of them was the uglier - George left many self-portraits from which it is clear that he was as unlovely as a Wesleyan minister or a Left-wing Labour politician. And then, having pupped two children, he deserted them and, in December 1802, reached Madras, before moving on to Calcutta. He was 28.
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