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 Lim is known as a watercolourist, his preferred medium for portraiture was pastel for he felt watercolour was a difficult medium due to its quick drying nature. As a consequence there are but a few portraits rendered in this medium by him. Despite Lim’s reservations, the execution of ‘Girl’ in watercolour displays a sensitivity and confidence possible only from one who has mastery of the medium.
