Chinese scrolls on view at Elvehjem museum

Two Chinese scroll portraits are on view through December at the Elvehjem Museum of Art, on temporary loan from the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

The works are displayed in the niche between Brittingham Galleries VII and VIII on the museum’s third floor.

Bringing these Chinese paintings to the museum fulfills a primary mission of the Elvehjem: to support the teaching, research and public service missions of UW–Madison. These portraits will be intensively studied by students in two fall semester art history classes, Chinese Painting and Portraiture in East Asia, both taught by Chinese art historian and professor Julia Murray.

“Because these portraits were made for members of the royal family and high courtiers, they are of high quality and include a lot of sumptuous details, certainly by comparison with the “ancestor portraits’ of ordinary individuals that may be more familiar to museum-goers,” Murray says. “The more formal of the two is a portrait of an unidentified court lady, who is dressed in gorgeous robes whose intricate designs are shown in all their detail.

“The portrait of Prince Guo is interesting because he is depicted outdoors, in a garden, and the scene is lively,” Murray adds. “Together they represent two major types of Chinese portrait, the memorial portrait and the character portrait.”

These two scroll paintings come out of a long tradition of making portrait images for use in memorial ceremonies, a practice that initially was limited to the highest social status, but in recent centuries spread to the middle classes. Before the invention of the camera, painting was the only way to record a face for posterity. Under the influence of Buddhism, portrait images came to be used in rituals associated with ancestor veneration, an important practice in traditional Chinese culture. Although ancestor portraits were traditionally kept in the family and were not displayed publicly, many came into the art market and were bought by Westerners in the first half of the 20th century.

Both portraits come from a larger group sold in the 1940s to American Richard Pritzlaff by prominent Beijing dealer Wu Lai-hsi, who claimed that they came from the former Qing palace.