Though the Cixi portrait belongs to the Smithsonian, more than 100 of the 135 works in the show are on loan from the Palace Museum.Įmpress Dowager Ci'an, Qing dynasty, China, Beijing, ca. It took more than four years to organize. The museum’s director Chase Robinson says the show is the largest in more than a decade there and the first three-way collaboration between the Palace Museum in Beijing, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts and the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries of Asian Art. Sackler, which opened March 28 and continues through June 23. This is one of the many startling discoveries in the exhibition, “Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644 – 1912,” at the Smithsonian’s Arthur M. Louis and was then gifted to Teddy Roosevelt. Carl did the portrait in the Art Nouveau style. Louis Exposition, hoping to boost U.S.-China relations at a fraught time. This was at a time when almost no outsider, especially a foreigner, had access to the empress’s private rooms in the imperial palace in Beijing and when, by tradition, only men were permitted to paint formal court portraits.Įver political, Cixi wanted a Westerner to paint a portrait destined for the West. In 1903, seemingly inexplicably, an American woman painted a 15-foot-tall portrait of China’s Empress Dowager Cixi, the last empress of the Qing dynasty, the lineage of hereditary rulers that governed from 1644 to 1912 and is renowned for its wealth, splendor and ostentatious displays of power.
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