Edward Ashworth, Artist & Architect

An important collection of fourteen original watercolour studies of Hong Kong & Macau, painted by the travelling English architect Edward Ashworth in the mid-1840s, just after the first Opium War and at the very beginning of Hong Kong's first colonial buildng boom. These drawings represent an exceptional documentary archive, sometimes the only recorded images of certain buildings or streetscapes. Ashworth's important article "Chinese Architecture" of 1851 reproduced a few of these images as lithograph plates.