Focus on this artwork and explain the History.
Most of the drawings were made in Malacca, before his tenure as Resident and Commandant of Singapore. On the basis that Raffles hired a Chinese artist from Macao to do natural history drawings (as described by Munshi Abdullah ), John Bastin conjectured that this artist and perhaps others were hired by Farquhar to paint watercolours of the flora and fauna of the Malay Peninsula. Kwa Chong Guan extended this conjecture via stylistic comparison to identify the artists of Farquhar's drawings as from Guandong. Farquhar donated these in eight volumes to the Museum of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland on 17 June 1826. In 1937, the Society lent six of the volumes to the Library of the British Museum (Natural History) (now the Library of the Natural History Museum), retaining the two volumes of botanical drawings in its own library. In 1991 the Natural History Museum returned the works to the Society for valuation, and on 20 October 1993 the Society offered them for sale by auction at Sotheby's in London, where they were acquired by Goh Geok Khim, founder of the brokerage firm GK Goh, for S$3 million.
Goh donated the drawings to the National Museum of Singapore in 1995.
The drawings was designated by the National Museum of Singapore as one of 11 "national treasures" in January 2006.As at 2011, the collection was believed to be worth at least $11 million. In 2011, 70 works from the collection were placed on permanent display in the Goh Seng Choo Gallery of the museum, named for Goh's father.
Singapore watercolour botanical drawings Malay Chinese Malacca Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland Malay Peninsula S$ National Museum of Singapore Sotheby's Resident and Commandant of Singapore Natural History Museum Munshi Abdullah Goh Seng Choo Gallery