Yang Guifei Playing a Flute
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.
Artwork Details
- 狩野常信筆 楊貴妃吹笛図
- Title: Yang Guifei Playing a Flute
- Artist: Kano Tsunenobu (Japanese, 1636–1713)
- Period: Edo period (1615–1868)
- Date: 17th–18th century
- Culture: Japan
- Medium: Hanging scroll; ink and color on silk
- Dimensions: 35 3/4 x 13 in. (90.8 x 33 cm)
- Classification: Paintings
- Credit Line: The Howard Mansfield Collection, Purchase, Rogers Fund, 1936
- Object Number: 36.100.88
- Curatorial Department: Asian Art
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Kano Tsunenobu
17th–18th century
Kano Tsunenobu
17th century
Kano Tsunenobu
17th–18th century
Kano Tsunenobu
late 17th–early 18th century
Kano Tsunenobu
17th–early 18th century
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