The woman who painted the Chinese Empress
Katharine A. Carl (1865 – 1938) paintings have been exhibited at Paris Salon, later her works were displayed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago – both in the so-called Fine Arts Palace and in the Women’s Building.
Possessing herself as a portraitist and working by commissions of the aristocratic clientele, including Algerian and Egyptian royals, as well as American upper classes, paved her the way to the Chinese court. Her brother was an American government official, operating in the high classes in China, who had previously arranged Katharine’s visit to Shanghai, and was familiar with the wife of the U.S. minister to China, at the suggestion of whom Katharine was selected to portray the last powerful empress of Qing dynasty- Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后, also called Tz’u-Hsi; 1835 –1908), continuing the lineage of the few Western artists who were fortunate to capture the female royals of the celestial empire.
The solid- sixteen feet tall in an ornate camphor-wood frame, painted in 1903, the portrait made its way to the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 before the Dowager Cixi presented the picture as a state gift to President Theodore Roosevelt, who promptly deposited it at the Smithsonian Institution.
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