Art | Documentary traces George Chinnery’s path

Walking in Macau’s meandering alleys and backstreets, Patrick Conner often found himself surrounded by typical scenes that 19th Century British painter George Chinnery would stop and draw.
The London-based scholar and gallery director spent over a week filming in town as the presenter of a documentary that traces Chinnery’s footsteps. He narrates at the historical A-Ma Temple and St. Paul Ruins, on the beach in Coloane and a fishing boat in the Inner Harbor, taking audience back in time to the different locations that appeared in Chinnery’s watercolors and sketches.
“It’s a great combination of wonderful locations and wonderful art,” Mr Conner told the Times on the sidelines of shooting a scene at the Macau Museum of Art last Friday.
“Chinnery is a man who really lends himself to a film, because he had a very interesting life, he’s a brilliant artist who everybody can appreciate. And Macau is a wonderful place for him to live, so it’s almost surprising that a documentary film hasn’t been made about him before,” the scholar said, talking about the artist who lived for 27 years in Macau until his death in 1852, and who was subsequently buried at the Old Protestant Cemetery.
Among many Western artists who visited the Orient, Chinnery was known as the only one to live in China up to that date. His paintings inspired a school of Cantonese export painters at the time, and he left Macau a legacy of documenting everyday life.
“What he’s specialized in doing is painting portraits, landscapes and oils, but what people really remember are the little drawings in pencil, pen and ink of everyday scenes of blacksmiths, fishermen, boat people, or vendors, porters, sharpers: Chinese people doing their everyday activities,” explained Mr Conner.
As Chinnery immersed himself in all kinds of daily rituals and conveyed his obsession on sketchbooks and canvases, the documentary team decided to include as many locations as possible to showcase “a more modern interpretation of what Chinnery saw all the time.”
“Of course some of the locations where Chinnery went no longer exist or they are unrecognizable, but the wonderful thing about Macau is the old historical center is so well preserved. You can still walk the way Chinnery walked and see some of the things that he saw,” said the scholar.
The filming team has been getting up before sunrise to catch the “magical hour” when the light creates watercolors in reality, as Chinnery was said to often draw up to ten to twelve sketches before breakfast.
Producer of the documentary, Campbell McLean, also explained that the film is not to put George Chinnery on a pedestal as an English artist, but to “highlight a Chinese way of life” through his artworks.
“These are beautiful depictions of a way of life and he was here to capture that, not just the urban landscape. Without him, we wouldn’t have been able to see what it was like,” he said.
Mr McLean, a New Zealand native living in Macau, sees a keen interest in exploring stories of Macau’s culture and history and promoting them to a wider audience. The turbulent times Chinnery lived in caught his attention, as it was “a very critical time in Macau’s history” throughout the first Opium War and the establishment of a British colony in Hong Kong.
“We saw an opportunity to tell a very important story about Macau. The city has a great history, and this is a story that has appealed to a global audience; it’s a key story in relation to Macau’s art history,” he said, adding that the one-hour long documentary is expected to be released on TDM and CCTV-9 as well as British and US broadcasters by year-end.