Born in Amoy, China in 1912, Lim Cheng Hoe came to Singapore when he was 7. Primarily a self-taught artist, Lim studied art under Richard Walker, Singapore’s first Art Inspector of Schools, at the Raffles Institution in the early 1930s. Lim was a prominent and significant first generation artist due to his treatment of the local landscape in the watercolour medium and is associated with the Nanyang Style. He was also a founding member of the Singapore Watercolour Society. Lim passed away in 1979 in Singapore.Although watercolour remained Lim’s main medium of expression throughout his artistic oeuvre, he preferred pastel for portraiture, which he felt lends itself easily to the description of feeling and mood, like the gaiety in this work. In the mid 1950s, Lim spent considerable effort on portraiture in order to improve his representation of form.
