The themed seminar series on the exhibition Traveller’s Home: Masterworks by George Chinnery opened to the public last Saturday in the Macao Museum Auditorium. The forthcoming second and third seminars are not to be missed if you failed to catch last week’s first installment! The first seminar, ‘George Chinnery and Macao’, was hosted by respected Macao scholar Dr. Chan Kai Chon, and focused on Chinnery’s background, his family life and his travels from London to India via Dublin. In 1825, Chinnery travelled from India to Macao by ship and he thereafter resided in Macao until his death in 1852, and he is now buried in the Macao Protestant Cemetery.

In order to enable the public to gain a deeper understanding of George Chinnery’s life, Dr. Chan made use of a variety of historical information and pictures to analyse and explain the value and significance of his work in the history of Macao. In addition to vividly capturing Macao’s landscape, Chinnery’s works also bear witness to a number of historical figures at the time.

More than 50 people including art enthusiasts, local residents, teachers and students, attended the first seminar. The seminar was well-spirited and enjoyable, and all participants were keen to ask questions about the experiences of this foreign painter who spent much of his life in Macao and the influence that his work had on China and Macao, which Dr. Chan answered one by one. The second seminar, ‘George Chinnery - A European Artist in the East’ (in English with Cantonese interpretation), will be hosted by English scholar Dr. Patrick Conner at 3:00 pm - 5:00pm on Saturday 5th June 2010.

The third seminar, ‘Macao, Guangzhou and Hong Kong in the Era of Chinnery (1825-1852)’ (in Cantonese), will be hosted by Hong Kong scholar Dr. Joseph Ting Sun Pao at 3:00pm - 5:00pm on Saturday 19th June 2010.