The Ghost Painter

Shelagh Vainker, the Curator of Chinese Art, introduces us to Miao Jiahui, the ‘ghost painter’ of the Chinese Empress Dowager. The Ashmolean holds a rare painting of some peonies, in which she came out of the shadows by signing her name as the artist.

Peonies by Miao Jiahui – View it here

If you want to take a closer look at the painting discussed in this episode, you can view it at the link above, or visit the podcast page on the Ashmolean website: ashmolean.org/museum-secrets

Producer: Lucie Dawkins
Presenters: Lucie Dawkins and Shelagh Vainker

About Museum Secrets: The curators at the University of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology have been recording bite-sized tales of the wonderful, and sometimes unexpected, life of a museum. We can’t wait to share them with you! Join us every weekday for 3 weeks, from 28 December onwards, for a daily dose of cheer.

Transcript

Lucie: This is Museum Secrets from the Ashmolean. 

I’m your host, Lucie Dawkins, and every day I’ll be bringing you a bite sized undercover story from our collections. Step in through the front doors, and join me for some joyful, wonderful, and sometimes bizarre tales hidden in the objects. We will be going behind the scenes and beyond the labels, into dark corners of the storerooms and into the minds of the curators.

Today is our final story in this series. In the last episode, we hear about a secret woman hidden in a painting, and we’re following on that theme today as we head into the Ashmolean’s collection of Chinese art. Here’s curator Shelagh Vainker to tell us more.

Shelagh: The work of art I’m going to talk about here was painted just over 100 years ago in China. When it arrived in the museum in 2013 as part of a bequest I noticed it not just because it’s a bright and attractive flower painting but also because it stood out in the collection to which it had previously belonged. The Sullivan Collection of modern Chinese art includes more than 400 works – mostly ink paintings but also prints and sculpture – and the ink paintings are expressive, individualistic works, mostly gifts to the Sullivans from the artists who had created them, and many of whom were not from mainland China, but from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore or the wider Chinese diaspora. This ostensibly conventional piece by contrast was painted in Beijing – or Peking as it was then also known – within the confines of the imperial palace. A palace that was soon to be abandoned at the fall of an empire that had lasted, with few interruptions, for more than 2000 years. The peony flower that is the subject of the painting had been an imperial favourite for most of that time. At most periods, the imperial courts housed magnificent art collections, assembled or overseen by the emperor, who might be motivated by personal taste, or displays of ownership or power, but who would always be a practitioner of calligraphy and often a painter in his own right (there was only one empress, ever, who ruled in her own right). During most dynasties there were also court painters. Court painters were appointed to produce works for halls and apartments throughout the palace, for special occasions and for gifts, and sometimes they were organised as a painting academy within the imperial household. The artist who painted this work was Miao Jiahui. She was originally from the far southwest of China, more than 2,000 kilometres from Beijing. As a young widow she was recommended by the governor of Yunnan in response to a directive from the Empress Dowager Cixi to find women who could serve her as daibi ‘substitute brushes’. Or, more familiarly to us, ‘ghost painters’.

Of the eighteen artists who attended her in this role, each serving ten days each month and also providing instruction, Miao Jiahui was the Empress Dowager’s favourite. It is said she was at her side from morning to evening - and all the flower paintings subsequently presented as gifts from the Empress to her officials, and bearing the imperial seal, were in fact painted by her. She was also admired in the city beyond the court; nonetheless, it is rare for one of Miao Jiahui’s paintings to bear her own signature, as this one does.

The painting is in the traditional format of a hanging scroll: it is mounted on blue silk and shows a bouquet of peonies – two white, one cream and two red, their stems bound with twine - against a plain ground: the lavish blooms, with fine layers upon layers of delicately frilled petals, are offset by the flat leaves with their distinctive  three-pointed silhouette. The painting technique she has used is one of fine line and clear colour, similar to the technique of gongbi or ‘skilled brush’ traditionally used for flower and bird paintings, or figures, and particularly associated with court painting.

The peony flower had been the subject of paintings for a thousand years before this work was created; as a motif, it had appeared on architecture, metalwork, textiles and other materials for even longer than that. It was also the subject of many poems from around AD 300 and in particular, in the Tang poetry of the 8th and 9th centuries when peonies were cultivated in the imperial gardens. Most of the poems emphasised the flower’s beauty and sensuousness but in the following dynasty, the Song, scholar officials wrote in detail about the different varieties and their names as well. They also wrote about the different customs associated with the peony: how it was offered as imperial tribute; exchanged as gifts; presented as awards; used as medicine. By the beginning of the 12th century it was cultivated all across north China and along the east coast and was hugely popular throughout society. A monk who founded a temple in Hangzhou for example planted more than 1,000 peonies in more than 100 varieties, and the crowds who came to admire them drank and enjoyed music throughout several days of flower-viewing during the peony festival.

In the inscription on the painting, Miao Jiahui writes that she, Miao Jiahui, ‘respectfully paints this and reverendly congratulates the imperially favoured noble lady Aunt Luo….on her 80th birthday’; it is evidently a private token, one that she felt able to mark with her own name.  She has selected an elegant subject for an elegant gift, a gesture from a palace lady in the form of a finely depicted plant with imperial associations that stretch back centuries.

But it also represents a colourful popular flower, and can serve I think as an uplifting reminder for anyone whose talents have been purloined or whose work has been kept in the shadows, or whose creativity has been suppressed, eclipsed, appropriated or diverted by someone more powerful, that a thing of delicacy and subtlety, in this case a simple bunch of flowers with its even simpler inscription – crucially a name – can outshine all that. 

Lucie: And if you want to take a closer look at this beautiful bunch of peonies, you can find a link in the podcast notes. Although this is the final episode in this series, there will be more Ashmolean podcasts in the coming weeks. Stayed tuned, and we will back with you soon.