Chinese nobles in oil paintings of the Dutch-American artist
The Dutch-American artist Hubert Vos (1855 – 1935) has graduated from Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and has been exhibited widely in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, Dresden, and Munich. He became famous for portraying the Dowager Empress of China- Cixi in the early 1900s.
He extensively traveled and made a trip to China in the year 1899, a few months before the Boxer Rebellion began. During this visit, Vos sought permission to paint the empress dowager and her nephew, the Guangxu emperor, but he was unsuccessful, supposedly because of the prevailing anti-foreign flows all across China. Nonetheless, he selected a variety of subjects to depict in China, including a daughter of an official of the Fujian navy, and a portrait of a young Manchu man, as well as Yuan Shi-Kai (1859–1916), a viceroy who would later briefly become the first president of China, and Prince Qing (1836–1918), a senior member at court and a relative by marriage to the Empress Dowager, and a Suzhou girl from an aristocratic family. Perhaps because of his background in painting society portraits, Vos’ portraits of Asian subjects tended to endow them with a certain glamor and dignity. One critic described his portraits as “delicate, smooth, and accomplished.”, and that he made “the exotic” fashionable and tangible to his Western audience. Thus, by the 1900s he was already enhancing Western art with Chinese motifs and themes.
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