Lost History – The forgotten friendship of the American painter and the Chinese Empress
In 1903, American portrait painter Katharine Carl was asked to travel to China in order to complete a very special commission. She was invited to stay for nine months at the imperial court and to live in close proximity to the most powerful person in the Eternal Kingdom, the primary subject of her work – Dowager Empress Cixi.
China and its conventions had long been a mystery to the west and the imperial court had persisted as the enigmatic epicentre of the empire for centuries. To have been granted unique access to the infamous dowager’s inner circles, consisting of scheming ladies-in-waiting and machiavellian eunuchs, was a chance too rare to miss.
As the de facto ruler of China, Dowager Empress Cixi had become a notoriously ruthless and regressive figure in the minds of most western people (she was rumoured to have poisoned her son who sat on the imperial throne before her undisputed tenure at the top of imperial politics), but despite the cultural gulf between Carl and Cixi, and the Dowager’s reputation for inhumanity and apathy, the two struck up a close and sincere friendship.
In 1900, the Boxer Rebellion erupted across the empire. It spelt the violent deaths of any foreigners the rebellion encountered. Cixi, deciding to use her people’s animosity towards foreigners out of political expediency, publicly backed the revolt. Its suppression by troops from Europe and the United States was a massive humiliation for Cixi and foreshadowed the permanent dwindling of imperial power.
Seeking favour with the victorious foreigners she had only recently turned upon, the Empress began meeting with westerners to improve her image in their eyes. It was out of these events that Katharine Carl’s life-changing trip came about. Carl was contacted in 1903 by the wife of the American ambassador to China, Edwin H Conger, requesting her to come to Beijing that summer.
The portraits Carl was contracted to paint were to be exhibited in the hotly anticipated Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a world fair that boasted an exorbitant budget of over $15 million. Katharine’s contribution was meant to evince the secret characters at the apex of Chinese society, to indulge a growing interest in the obscure state of affairs in the Far East, but her eagerness to indelibly depict an ancient world was quickly thwarted by limitations on her artistic freedom.
Carl’s arrival in the Forbidden City in the summer of 1903 was a shock to her social assumptions. China’s identity is largely based on its uninterrupted longevity. Many of the customs and rites created over a thousand years ago were still being practised in the last days of the Qing dynasty.
She had to wear the heavy and opulent regalia of the Empress’ entourage and was obliged to adhere to strict codes of courtly conduct. The orthodoxy of Cixi’s realm imposed rigid rules on Carl’s approach to her portraits.
As Carl wrote in her book on her time with the Empress Cixi, “I was obliged to follow, in every detail, centuries-old conventions. There could be no shadows and very little perspective, and everything must be painted in such full light as to lose all relief and picturesque effect. When I saw I must represent Her Majesty in such a conventional way as to make her unusually attractive personality banal, I was no longer filled with the ardent enthusiasm for my work with which I had begun it, and I had many a heartache and much inward rebellion before I settled on the inevitable”.
Cixi’s officials insisted that her American guest not share details about life in the Forbidden City. The protected mystique of the imperial court had been gravely damaged by the advent of modern technology and the prospects of industrialisation.
The aura of imperial China had seriously started to dissipate, and officials were all too aware that their authority chiefly emanated from the furtive theatrics of the royal household. Any threat to that mystique endangered their entire system of government, but Carl was a good guest who charmed her hosts and she revealed little until the publication of her book in 1906.
She enjoyed a particularly good relationship with the controversial Empress Cixi and was inducted into the Order of the Double Dragon and awarded the honour of the Flaming Pearl by her renowned patroness.
Carl completed four portraits of the Dowager Empress and produced many others of high ranking members of government. One of her portraits of Cixi, painted in 1904, was given to Theodore Roosevelt, who donated it to the Smithsonian Institute collection. Though the paintings were not a success in the eyes of their creator, Katharine Carl certainly benefited from a singular experience.
She was the only westerner to reside in the vicinity of the imperial court and was one of the last people to catch a glimpse of the majesty and regality of an archaic monarchy.