22
P. H. COLLIN
of the time. The painting of the praya at Macao (No. XVII) is a scene which is found in many nineteenth-century illustrated books;* the picture of the East walls of Canton (No. XXXV) is virtually the same as that of the frontispiece of Fisher's Three Years' Service in China, that of Howqua's garden (No. XLV) closely resembles the frontispiece of Albert Smith's pamphlet To China and Back. The dealer from whom the paintings were acquired was unable to identify their origin, nor the artist whose initials G.A.S. appear on numbers XXXIII and XLV. Nor was it possible to find any clues as to the whereabouts of the missing paintings, which, to go by the Roman numbers on the reverse, must be at least twenty-five in number.
To discover the identity of the artist, there are certain clues in the paintings themselves. In view of their dates, it seems certain that he must have come to the Far East in connection with the "Arrow" war and the capture of Canton in December 1857. Reinforcements for this campaign were requested by Admiral Seymour in the summer of 1857 and arrived in China waters during the autumn of that year. The first to arrive were the steam-transports Imperador and Imperatrix, which reached Hong Kong on 28th October and 6th November respectively. Some time after them came the Adelaide, also a steamer, which, although leaving England at the same time as others (the Imperador left Plymouth on August 10th, the Imperatrix on 12th August, the Adelaide on 17th August), only arrived in Hong Kong on December 1st. Wingrove Cooke, in his despatches to "The Times", reveals the impatience of the Hong Kong garrison with what he calls "this lagging log, the Adelaide." In a later report, he states that "the long-expected Adelaide made her appearance on the 1st, having on board twenty officers and 507 rank and file". Judging from the date on the first painting, the artist we are concerned with must have been aboard the Adelaide: perhaps he devoted himself to painting to relieve the tedium of the excessively long voyage.
There were, of course, people in Hong Kong at the time who might have painted the pictures. Albert Smith mentions meeting on 24th August 1858 the son-in-law of the P. and O. agent, a “Mr.
* As, for example, in James Orange, The Chater Collection, Pictures relating to China, Hong Kong, Macao 1655-1830 (1924).