Skip to main content

Commemorative Album for Lady Danxiang (Ge Xiuying)

Artist/Maker (Chinese, 1758–1844)
Date1792
MediumInk and color on paper
DimensionsOverall: 14 1/4 × 8 1/4 × 2 1/4 in. (36.2 × 21 × 5.7 cm)
Credit LineR. T. Miller Jr. Fund
Object number1997.30
Status
Not on view
More Information
This touching collection consists of a portrait and numerous colophons dedicated to the life and tragic early death of a young woman in late 18th century China. The calligraphy is in clerical script; its formal and archaic quality corresponds to the poem’s function as a eulogy.

Gě Xiùyīng 葛秀英 was the wife of a scholar named Qín Aò 秦鏊. The couple was associated with many of the leading cultural figures of their day, who considered them to be living embodiments of the stereotypical ideal couple who combined “talents plus beauty” (cáizǐ jiārén 才子佳人). After Gě’s untimely death at age nineteen, her grief-stricken husband commissioned a portrait and requested poems and essays from friends to make this album in her memory, a moving testament of his love.

Atypical of the idealized images of women from the period, this painting portrays Gě in plain scholar’s robes, holding a writing brush in her hand, with a distant, melancholy facial expression. This sense of remoteness is enhanced by use of the compositional device of framing her as if seen through a window.
Exhibition History
New Acquisitions, 1996-1997
  • Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH (February 10, 1998 - March 22, 1998 )
Asian Art and the Allen: American Collectors in the Early 20th Century
  • Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH (August 19, 2014 - July 12, 2015 )
Collections
  • Asian