The artist painted this portrait of Dr. Tan Tsze Chor (1911-83) on 14 February 1958 at his mansion on Upper East Coast Road. A Singaporean businessman of Teochew ancestry, Dr. Tan built his fortune on the rise in pepper prices in the 1950s after the Korean War. Since 2000, the Tan family has donated over a hundred art objects to the Asian Civilisations Museum from his Xiang Xue Zhuang, the first comprehensive collection of Chinese art in Singapore.A personal friend of Dr. Tan, Raden Basoeki Abdullah (1915-93) was a naturalistic portrait and landscape painter associated with the Mooi-Indies school of Western-style painting in Indonesia. This portrait, painted while Abdullah was court painter to President Sukarno in the Istana Merdeka, is typical of the academic romantic, idealized portraiture which made him a sought-after artist among elite circles in the region.
