“ The American artist in China who painted the Empress Dowager Cixi’s first ever portrait, and the story of the famous image”

The South China Morning Post Magazine on Sundays runs regular features on early foreigners in China. The one this week about American portraitist, Katherine Carl, above in 1905, who painted the very first, and also the only ever, portraits of China’s last Empress Dowager, Ci Xi. A fascinating story.

/Snip:

At 11 o’clock on a warm summer’s morning in 1903, 38-year-old artist Katharine Augusta Carl was ushered into the throne room of the Summer Palace, on the western outskirts of Beijing.

67-year-old Empress Dowager Cixi, who had effectively controlled China for more than 40 years, entered with her chief lady-in-waiting and interpreter Princess Der Ling, an ambassador’s daughter who had spent time in Europe and the United States.

By Cixi’s side, as always, was the Guangxu Emperor who, though technically the 10th sovereign of the Qing dynasty, acquiesced in all matters to the empress dowager.

Dressed in her ceremonial gown, Cixi was assisted onto the Dragon Throne by her attendant eunuchs while the ladies of the court fussed with her robe and headdress and Carl prepared her easel next to a table with paints, brushes, rags, turpentine, palette knives, and all the other tools of the portrait painter’s trade.

Positioned and comfortable, the two women eyed each other across the room. The empress dowager nodded, and the painter made her first stroke on the blank canvas.

Over nine long months several portraits would be attempted. The main life-size image was to be China’s sole entry in the Fine Arts Pavilion at the 1904 World’s Fair, in St Louis, Missouri, and presented thereafter to US president Theodore Roosevelt. READ ON…

The fourth Carl portrait of Ci Xi, now in the Smithsonian Institute. It was presented to president Teddy Roosevelt after the 1904 World Fair:

The portrait itself is on 6’x10’ canvas mounted in a 14’ high camphor wood frame. The characters above say “Empress Dowager Ci Xi of the Qing dynasty”. It doesn’t say who made them, but I assume they are painted (not written with a brush) by Carl. They are done well. Katherine Carl ended her life as a successful portrait painter in New York, though she wrote of that first year in the Summer Palace, painting Ci Xi, that “it was by far the most charming experience of my life”. No wonder! Look at the article and see her Summer Palace studio and the cottage she lived in. And who she met. 

Ci Xi also died of old age, the last of the Qings ruling from Beijing.