Adventurous rogue

Historically, British artists have not been good at money management. George Morland (1762–1804) was chronically insolvent; Benjamin Haydon (1786–1846) served four jail terms for debt and eventually killed himself after being reduced to pawning his spectacles; even Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) died leaving debts of £30,000. But the painter who turned serial defaulting into an art was George Chinnery (1774–1852). Absconding was the making of him as an artist suggests a new exhibition, The Flamboyant Mr Chinnery, at Asia House.

A Londoner and fellow student of Turner at the Academy Schools, Chinnery launched his portrait-painting career in Dublin four years before the Act of Union emptied the Irish Parliament of MPs, and his studio of sitters. In 1802, aged 28, he left his new Irish wife with two children under two and boarded an East Indiaman for Madras — the first of a lifelong succession of flits.