Yang Guifei Leaving the Bath (1700s): Art, History and Details

Yang Guifei Leaving the Bath (1700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This painting relates to the legendary love story between Tang dynasty (618–906) emperor Xuanzong and his consort, the beautiful Yang Guifei. Set in what appears to be an 18th-century southern interior, the artist depicts Yang Guifei in a fashionable dress of semitransparent red gauze. Due to the warm and humid climate in China’s southeast, local silk workshops specialized and excelled in making airy gauze garments. Yang’s nude body can be seen through the red robe as she leaves the bath. Her servant offers her a bowl of soup. The presence of a male figure would have been a breach of customary protocol; cross-dressed as a male scholar, the earrings reveal that Yang’s attendant is in fact a girl.

Object facts

• Title: Yang Guifei Leaving the Bath
• Date: 1700s
• Culture: China, Qing dynasty (1644–1911)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Hanging scroll; ink, colors, and gold on silk
• Dimensions: Painting only: 96.5 x 44.1 cm (38 x 17 3/8 in.); Overall with knobs: 231.8 x 73 cm (91 1/4 x 28 3/4 in.)
• Collection: ASIAN - Hanging scroll
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 2017.65

A detail from the museum

Due to the warm and humid climate in China’s southeast, silk workshops specialized in making airy gauze garments, like the one worn by Yang Guifei here.

Collection credit

Gift of The MCH Foundation

Further reading listed by the museum

• Spee, Clarissa von. "From the SIlk Road to the Imperial Court: Chinese Textiles in the Cleveland Museum of Art." Arts of Asia 48, no. 3(May-June 2018): 50-56.
• Griswold, William, Xiaofei Tian, Richard Von Glahn, Feng Zhao, S. J. Vainker, Masaaki Itakura, Jiang Wu, et al. China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta. Edited by Clarissa von Spee. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2023.

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.