Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People

by Isaac Taylor Headland

The Empress Dowager kept eighteen court painters, selected from among the best artists of the country, and appointed by herself, whose whole duty it was to paint for her. They were divided into three groups, and each group of six persons was required to be on duty ten days of each month. As I was deeply interested in the study of Chinese art I became intimately acquainted with most of the court painters and knew the character of their work. The head of this group was Mr. Kuan. I called on him one day, knowing that he was not well enough to be on duty in the palace, and I found him hard at work. Like the small boy who told his mother that he was too sick to go to school but not sick enough to go to bed, so he assured me that his troubles were not such as to prevent his working, but only such as make it impossible for him to appear at court. Incidentally I learned that the drain on his purse from the squeezes to the eunuchs aggravated his disease.

"When Her Majesty excused me from appearing at the palace," he explained, "she required that I paint for her a minimum of sixty pictures a year, to be sent in about the time of the leading feasts. These she decorates with her seals, and with appropriate sentiments written by members of the College of Inscriptions, and she gives them, as she gives her own, as presents during the feasts." Mr. Kuan and I became intimate friends and he painted three pictures which he presented to me for my collection.

One day another of the court painters came to call on me and during the conversation told me that he was painting a picture of the Empress Dowager as the goddess of mercy. Up to that time I had not been accustomed to think of her as a goddess of mercy, but he told me that she not infrequently copied the gospel of that goddess with her own pen, had her portrait painted in the form of the goddess which she used as a frontispiece, bound the whole up in yellow silk or satin and gave it as a present to her favourite officials. Of course I thought at once of my collection of paintings, and said:

"How much I should like to have a picture of the Empress Dowager as the goddess of mercy!"

"I'll paint one for you," said he.

All this conversation I soon discovered was only a diplomatic preliminary to what he had really come to tell me, which was that he had been eating fish in the palace a few days before, and had swallowed a fish-bone which had unfortunately stuck in his throat. He said that the court physicians had given him medicine to dissolve the fish-bone, but it had not been effective; he therefore wondered whether one of the physicians of my honourable country could remove it. I took him to my friend Dr. Hopkins who lived near by, and told him of the dilemma. The doctor set him down in front of the window, had him open his mouth, looked into his throat where he saw a small red spot, and with a pair of tweezers removed the offending fish-bone. And had it not been for this service on the part of Dr. Hopkins, I am afraid I should never have received the promised picture, for he hesitated as to the propriety of him, a court painter, doing pictures of Her Majesty for his friends. However as he often thereafter found it necessary to call Mrs. Headland to minister to his wife and children he came to the conclusion that it was proper for him to do so, and one day he brought me the picture.

The Empress Dowager not only loved to be painted as the goddess of mercy, but she clothed herself in the garments suitable to that deity, dressed certain ladies of the court as her attendants, with the head eunuch Li Lien-ying as their protector, ordered the court artists to paint appropriate foreground and background and then called young Yu, her court photographer, to snap his camera and allow Old Sol the great artist of the universe with a pencil of his light to paint her as she was.

One day while visiting a curio store on Liu Li Chang, the great book street of Peking, my attention was called by the dealer to four small paintings of peach blossoms in black and white, from the brush of the Empress Dowager. These pictures had been in the panels of the partition between two of the rooms of Her Majesty's apartments in the Summer Palace, and so I considered myself fortunate in securing them.

"You notice," said he, "that each section of these branches must be drawn by a single stroke of the brush. This is no easy task. She must be able to ink her brush in such a way as to give a clear outline of the limb, and at the same time to produce such shading as she may desire. Should her outline be defective, she dare not retouch it; should her shading be too heavy or insufficient, she cannot take from it and she may not add to it, as this would make it defective in the matter of calligraphy. A stroke once placed upon her paper, for they are done on paper, is there forever. This style of work is among the most difficult in Chinese art."

After securing these paintings, I showed them to a number of the best artists of the present day in Peking, and they all pronounced them good specimens of plum blossom work in monochrome, and they agreed with Lady Miao, that if the Empress Dowager had given her whole time to painting she would have passed into history as one of the great artists of the present dynasty.