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. ‘Rainclouds at Sunset’ is representative; the atmospheric quality of a location, and not the details, is most important. Employing washes and largely the wet on wet technique, Lim allows the glow of the setting sun to suffuse the grey blue clouds descending on the horizon to achieve a strongly atmospheric work of an approaching storm.
