A view of the inner harbour, Macau, from the Casa Gardens

George Chinnery arrived at the picturesque peninsula of Macau in 1825, where, to the surprise of his countrymen, he would live out the rest of his life. He had been forced to flee his previous home of some twenty-three years in Calcutta, having accumulated insurmountable debts. The Portuguese had been allowed to settle in Macau in the 1550s, and it was an important stopping point for Western merchants on the busy trade route from the West to Canton. Local trade regulations dictated that they could not remain in Canton outside of the winter trading season; rather than embark on the long journey home, many chose to spend the rest of the year in Macau, some eighty miles away down the Pearl River.
Although the majority of its population remained Chinese, the resident Western merchants and their families grew into a thriving community, which served as a useful source of portrait sitters for Chinnery. Commissions provided a much-needed income, but one of his sitters, Lady Harriet Paget, commented that ‘he likes landscape painting a thousand times better than portrait painting’ (see P. Conner, op. cit., pp. 126-7). His Macau landscapes are acutely vibrant in colour, giving a beautifully atmospheric impression of the peninsula and its broad, rolling hills and mountains, and the present work is among the finest in the group. It depicts the gardens of one of the more impressive houses looking over the inner harbour, which became generally known as the Casa. While the East India Company held a monopoly on British trade with the Chinese, it played host to a series of senior company members. The Casa Gardens also included a plot of land that the British had purchased to serve as a Protestant cemetery, where Chinnery himself is buried.