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. In ‘View from Pearl’s Hill’ Lim offers the viewer a glimpse of the city through an opening in the foliage. This technique of framing the main subject with plants is often seen in Lim’s landscape paintings. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lim’s art leaned towards abstraction; as can be seen in ‘View from Pearl’s Hill’ there is no meticulous detailing of the buildings, instead, broad strokes of coloursuggest the structures of the city.
