Replicating Faces: Scale, Emblems, and Fashions in Qing-Dynasty Portraits of Chinese Women

This paper focuses on portrait-like figure paintings and portraits of famous women produced by unknown or professional painters for court or the marketplace in Qing-dynasty China. A vast number of images of women were life-size figures in paintings, panels, and murals; concurrently, depictions of groups of famous women also appeared in smaller and more portable formats. Though these portraits of women are paired with inscriptions containing their names and biographies, they are somewhat generic, bearing a distinct resemblance to images from other visual art forms. For instance, some notable portraits, such as those of the late Ming courtesans Ma Shouzhen (c. 1548-1604) and Liu Rushi (1618-1664), have been proven to be generic figure paintings. The issue of social identity in these portrait-like pictures is further complicated by their multiple copies. If these images of women appeared in multiple strikingly alike versions, do their faces tell us their stories? This paper examines the scale and pictorial conventions of portraits of women in the Qing dynasty to argue that historical Chinese women became famous through the replication and “fashioning” of their faces in a way that fed into celebrity culture.