beauties, now surrounded by symbols of literary attainment—brushes, scrolls, books. In addition to the continued production of overtly erotic renditions aimed primarily at a male viewer, another genre of woman’s portraits that “present women more as subjects in their own right” suggests women’s increasing involvement in purchasing and commissioning vernacular painting.80 Popular prints also support this argument. Whereas earlier depictions of beauties were dominated by courtesan figures sporting flirtatious poses that highlighted sexualizing motifs, late Qing popular prints portray women as validated by symbols of literary attainment, rather than erotic implications. In a print like figure 1.9, it is symbols of literacy and education—brushes, books, scrolls, painting—in addition to the male child that award the female sitter cultural heft. These women assert a newly defined social function—their education justified by their roles as teachers to their sons, and as such, responsible for family fortunes. But in turn, their fashionable clothing, featuring details such as the embroidered border or the cloud collar, came to reference the social status of being a cultured and educated lady.
FIGURE 1.9. The elegantly dressed mother and her son hold the viewer’s eye as they gaze out calmly, surrounded by emblems of literacy—ink, brush, paper, books. Educating Sons in the Women’s Quarters (Guifang jiaozi), mid-late Qing. Yishengcheng printshop, 90 x 54 cm. Xinjian County Museum, reprinted from Feng Jicai, Zhongghuo muban nianhua jicheng, Jiangzhou juan, 205, with permission from the Zhonghua Book Company.
The print workshop’s circulation of this ideal had wide influence. Both Yangliuqing and Taohuawu prints were highly commercialized endeavors, with printshops establishing branches to consolidate market share and reach. Yangliuqing, whose location on the Grand Canal meant it could access paper and dyes from Suzhou, had more than seventeen shops during the mid-late Qing period, and the most well-known shops opened branches beyond Yangliuqing, disseminating not just the artistic style and content of their prints but also fashionable styles.81 For example, when the Wan Chang print shop established a branch in Weixian, Shandong Province, print designers and print carvers were sent to help; even the prints themselves were sent along. Thus, the Yangliuqing print aesthetic infiltrated Weixian’s local print tradition (Yangjiabu).82 In Yangliuqing, most families worked in this trade, either full-time or part-time, and women’s labor was particularly important. Each year, during the spring quiet, or after the autumn harvest had been gathered, the print shops would distribute work to women in the surrounding forty-six villages. Their labor was most critical during the final stage, when color was added (some was printed, but much applied by hand): women had a reputation for talent in tinting facial features and dress details.83
With the expansion of Yangliuqing’s commercial reach, its style eventually reached the court. Successful print shops like Qi Jianlong opened a branch in Beijing’s Qianmen Gate neighborhood, and Yangliuqing print artists traveled to the capital, to work in locations such as Langfang Toutiao and Longfu Temple Street, and perhaps even at court.84 In providing a point of connection between imperial and vernacular styles, artists infused Yangliuqing prints with influence from imperial workshops, while at the same time this vernacular art form impacted imperial art, something evident from the nineteenth-century Manchu court’s “enjoying pleasures” portraits.
These informal dress portraits (bian fu xiang) were the counterparts of the official court dress portraits (chao fu xiang), and like today’s carefully curated magazine-spreads of celebrities at home, dress was a key way in which the desired construct of informal domesticity was communicated.85 Thus, in several examples from the Daoguang and Xianfeng periods (1859–61), the imperial consorts wear informal robes as standard. One example, Autumn’s Overflowing Happiness Courtyard (Xiyi qiuting tu), shows the Daoguang emperor sitting together with his third wife, Empress Xiaoquancheng (1808–1840), along with consorts and children on an autumn day in the Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanmingyuan; also known as the Old Summer Palace). The women all wear chenyi robes, which by that point was the established informal robe for Manchu women (fig. 1.10).86
FIGURE 1.10. An anonymous family portrait of the Daoguang emperor and his third wife, Empress Xiaoquancheng, alongside consorts and children. Autumn’s Overflowing Happiness Courtyard (Xiyi qiuting tuzhou), nineteenth century. Ink and color on paper, L 181 cm, W 202.5 cm. Palace Museum. Photograph by Hu Chui.
Xiaoquancheng was raised in Suzhou, apparently with artistic talents, and she had been swiftly promoted to first-rank concubine and then empress in 1834 after giving birth to the Daoguang emperor’s first prince, Yizhu (later the Xianfeng emperor). But intrigue blighted her rise, and she died suddenly at thirty-three after plotting to kill Prince Yixin, who was competing with Yizhu to become emperor.87 In images of Xiaoquancheng and female contemporaries, the vision of Manchu dress promoted by the regulations, and which circulated through imperially sponsored media like court painting, contrasts sharply with the Han-style dress seen in the earlier Yongzheng period beauties. These images present a new mode of informal beauty: a more confident assertion of Manchu style and a quite different bodily aesthetic—their heads larger in proportion than before, with sharply pointed chins and widened foreheads. This development is especially significant given the lack of Manchu female figures in popular prints.88 And yet, likely influenced by the Yangliuqing print workshops and probably professional workshops in Beijing (compare, for example, the women in the Mactaggart painting in fig. 1.2), similar facial shapes and figural proportions are found in another painting of Empress Xiaoquancheng in informal dress, Portrait of Empress Xiaoquancheng in Informal Dress (Xiaoquancheng huanghou bianzhuang xiang), unusual in presenting a woman and girl pairing (fig. 1.11). The empress wears a floral silk chenyi embroidered with plum and cherry blossoms, accessorized with embellished sleeve-bands, an elaborate, three-layer, willow-leaf-shaped cloud collar, and the Manchu headdress (liang ba tou) of stiffened black satin adorned with artificial flowers and precious stones. She stands, wrist exposed, leaning in behind the corner of the wooden table topped with a bowl of peaches, while the girl, likely her daughter, adopts a similar posture, playfully positioned by the stool. Both composition and fashionable dress visually connect this depiction with the Yangliuqing and Taohuawu beauties, a comparison particularly striking next to this Taohuawu print of a Suzhou gentlewoman (fig. 1.12).89 One wears a Manchu robe, the other a Han jacket and skirt, but the comparison hints at the convergence of each group in their confident presentations of fashionable dress.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the chenyi, previously close-fitting around the chest and sleeves as in figure 1.4, had evolved into a loose, embellished garment, generally worn underneath outer garments, unless in private.90 In his anecdotes on the Daoguang and Xianfeng courts, Mongolian scholar-official Chongyi (1885–1945) described the social mores that dictated how Manchu women wore these garments: “[When] inside [women] don’t wear [formal] pao robes but instead wear chenyi robes in green, yellow, peach, or moon white, but not crimson.”91 In the Mactaggart painting (see fig. 1.2), the women wear chenyi with long sleeveless vests (da kanjian) on top.92 But the chenyi was often combined with another less formal garment, the changyi outer gown. This had developed around the same time as the chenyi and was similar in style—straight-cut, round-necked, ankle-length—but it could not be worn alone and was even more decorative in style, particularly in the ruyi-headed slits on each side extending up to the armpit (kaixi).93 Chongyi described both styles in some detail: “The next most formal dress styles are the changyi and the chenyi,