Katharine Carl
Katharine Augusta Carl was an American portrait painter and author. She made paintings of notable and royal people in the United States, Europe, and Asia. She spent nine months in China in 1903 painting a portrait of the Empress Dowager Cixi for the St. Louis Exposition. On her return to America, she published a book about her experience, titled With the Empress Dowager.
The painting you see today is of course, the portrait of the Empress. Carl spent a total of nine months in China and painted four portraits of the Empress Dowager, later recording her memories as the only western foreigner to live within the precincts of the Chinese imperial court in its last days. She stayed there under the provision that she did not share information about the Forbidden City.
About creation of the painting she wrote: "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."
If you visit the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington DC before 23 June 2019, you can visit the Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644–1912 exhibition and enjoy this amazing portrait in person. : )
P.S. Here you can meet Kun Can, Chinese artist and one of the Four Great Monk Painters.