Yang Guifei Playing a Flute
Kano Tsunenobu Japanese
Not on view
Academic painters in the Edo period also sought to represent beauties in their paintings, but drew on a continental figure painting tradition instead of using the demimond directly as their subject. Yang Guifei, ill-fated concubine of the Tang emperor at the time of the An Lushan rebellion and most likely first known through a poem by Bai Luodian (772–846), was a metaphor for womanly beauty from very early times. There are references to her in the eleventh-century Tale of Genji [Genji Monogatari] and in the slightly earlier Pillow Book [Makura sōshi]. By the seventeenth century, her perosnification of fleshly beauty was so pervasive it was used to sell skin-whitening cream, a product described in a short vignette in The Mirror of Townsmen in our Land [Honcho chōnin kagami], a collection of merchant tales written by the novelist Saikaku (1642–1693) and published a year after his death.
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