On August 5, 1903, American artist Katharine Carl arrived at the Summer Palace outside of Beijing to begin a most unusual assignment: Paint the portrait of one of the most famous—if not notorious—women in the world.
“I looked around, and saw a charming little lady with a brilliant smile,” Carl recounted in her book, With the Empress Dowager of China, writing she found it “impossible” to believe that her attractive host “could be the so-called cruel, implacable tyrant…whose name had been on the lips of the world since 1900!”
Following the debacle of the Boxer War and the military occupation of North China by an international expeditionary force, China’s imperial court was looking to improve its image abroad.
Sarah Pike Conger, the wife of the American minister to China, had formed a favorable impression of the Empress Dowager Cixi when the court received the ladies of the diplomatic quarter for tea, and raised the idea of an oil painting of the Qing ruler to be sent to the St. Louis Exposition.