Palace Ladies (1644–1911): Art, History and Details

Palace Ladies (1644–1911) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Qiu Ying (Chinese, 1494–1552).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This handscroll illustrates the pursuits of court ladies in a palace precinct on a spring day. Women, young girls, and their maids amuse themselves by sitting on a swing, playing games, watering and admiring peonies, performing music together, playing the qin (zither), feeding a parrot on the balustrade and fish in the water, or catching butterflies. The life of elite women was mostly restricted to the so-called inner quarters, meaning the garden and inner courts of the house. This painting idealizes the world of young palace girls that in fact was often filled with boredom and waiting for a lover.

Object facts

• Title: Palace Ladies
• Date: 1644–1911
• Creator attribution: Qiu Ying (Chinese, 1494–1552)
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644–1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: handscroll; ink and color on silk
• Dimensions: Overall: 36.2 x 454.4 cm (14 1/4 x 178 7/8 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Handscroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1954.369

Collection credit

Gift of I. Theodore Kahn

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wangwright, Amanda S. "The Sick Man of Asia." In Visualizing the Body in Art, Anatomy, and Medicine Since 1800: Models and Modeling. Andrew Graciano, and Rebecca Marie Messbarger, eds., 180–200. London; New York: Routledge, 2019.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.