George Chinnery RHA

(Tipperary 1774-1852 Macau)

Portraits of Mrs Margaret Elizabeth Wood (nee Templeton) and Henry Wood, a pair each approximately 28 x 20.5cm (11 x 8in).

Footnotes

Provenance
By descent through the sitters' family.

Margaret Elizabeth Wood (1789-1879) was born in India and has an interesting family history, but not one that was uncommon for the time. Her parents were Thomas Templeton (1767-1816), a gentleman who served in the East India Company, and Margaret Skinner (1774-1802), a first generation Anglo-Indian. Margaret Wood's maternal grandparents were Hercules Skinner of Montrose, an officer in the East India Company Army of Scottish descent, and 'Jeany', a Rajput princess and daughter of a zamindar. 'Jeany' was taken prisoner at the age of fourteen and came under the care of Skinner, then an ensign, who treated her with great regard. They subsequently had seven children together, two girls and five boys, including Margaret (the sitter's mother) and James Skinner (also known as Sikander Sahib), a noted figure who founded Skinner's Horse, an irregular cavalry regiment in the British Indian Army that still exists today as part of the Indian Army.

Henry Wood (1782-1871) was born in England and attended Cheam School and then Eton before joining the Royal Military Academy at Woolwhich in 1797 as a cadet, where he studied the arts of engineering and artillery. As a younger son he was sent out into the world without an allowance, sailing from Portsmouth in March 1798 in the East India Company ship Good Hope. On arrival in India he became an Ensign of Engineers in the Honourable United East India Company service. It is likely that he prospered in Calcutta but little is known of the exact details of his career. He and his wife Margaret Elizabeth had two daughters who were sent to England in 1820, but he stayed on with his wife until he retired. They sailed home in January 1829 on the Lady Flora to Falmouth and returned to live at Littleton in Middlesex. He had a generous pension of £1000 a year which was maintained until his death.

By the beginning of the 19th Century George Chinnery was Calcutta's most fashionable portrait painter. His portraits from 1812-25 depict not only the pre-eminent figures of the time but also a variety of middle-ranking civil servants and professional men, together with their wives and families. The majority of Chinnery's sitters were European, indeed British. It was a sign of the times that Chinnery's subjects were predominantly British and also that they were dressed as Englishmen in every detail – unlike their fathers and grandfathers in the East who had sometimes had themselves and their families portrayed in oriental clothing. In most of Chinnery's portraits there is no notion of relating the European sitters either to the Indian environment or to the Indians with whose lives they were closely involved. Also worth noting, many prominent men of Chinnery's time had an Indian wife or mistress (like Margaret Elizabeth Wood's grandfather) however a shift in attitude meant that such an arrangement now excited sufficient disapproval to prevent it being openly acknowledged in a portrait. Chinnery almost certainly painted the portraits of Indian mistresses and their Eurasian offspring, however they were likely to have been subsequently discarded by disapproving grandchildren.