Worship Works
Memorial Chinese portraiture at the Sackler Gallery.

By Melissa Seckora, NR editorial associate
July 21-22, 2001

n traditional China, ancestor worship has long been a cornerstone of the culture. Since the 16th century, painted scrolls of deceased parents and forebears have served as a focus for private family rituals from emperors to scholars to peasants. These rituals, which the Chinese believe guide the deceased to the afterlife, continue to this day.

Worshipping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits, at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, gives us a rare opportunity to observe this fading form of memorial Chinese portraiture. With the advent of photography, painting as a means for recording images of family members has, for the most part, been replaced. It is remarkable that the 38 large scroll portraits that make up the core of the exhibition ever made it to the United States in the first place. Historically, ancestor portraits were kept in the family and rarely exhibited publicly. Possession of an ancestor portrait from someone else's family was considered taboo, if not dangerous.

As the story goes, an unusually large collection of 85 Chinese figure paintings from the 15th to the mid-20th centuries found its way to the Sackler Gallery in the early 1990s after an unknown 87-year-old horse breeder, and art collector, named Richard G. Pritzlaff offered his collection of portraits to the nation. Most of the works were first viewed on family altars in imperial China. They later made it to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s via an antique dealer, Wu Lai-hsi, who was active in Peking and London at the time. Oddly enough, the collection was even briefly owned by Ross Perot. After much trouble locating the perfect home for his prize collection, Pritzlaff finally invited the curators of the Sackler to his ranch in Sapello, New Mexico, warning them to get there "very soon or your gallery does not deserve to exhibit these works." The curators traveled to Pritzlaff's ranch, where they were awed by his collection.

Most of the works on display are portraits of the Manchu Qing Dynasty imperial family and China's social elite. Furniture, textiles, and other Chinese objects created between 1451 and 1943 are on hand, too. Almost all of the frontally posed portraits were done by anonymous artists; several represent the same individual. The portraits are practically life-size and are ornately painted in vivid colors. As the museum notes, some of the more informal portraits on view illustrate the stylistic exchanges between the ritual and secular portraits in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, a period in which realistic portraits were valued in China.

Every portrait has a story, and the museum goes to great length to tell each one. Take for instance the "Portrait of Oboi" (d. 1669, pictured at very top). Oboi was a powerful official who served the child emperor of the Kangxi reign (1662-1722) for eight years. Oboi, a domineering soul, provoked opposition to the court and was arrested and imprisoned, where he died. In 1713, however, the same emperor who had purged Oboi posthumously rehabilitated him to commemorate his battlefield exploits during the Manchu conquest of China that led to the founding of the Qing dynasty. Or, take the story behind the pair of scrolls depicting Prince Hongming and his princess wife, Lady Wanyan (pictured above), at the start of the exhibition. Like Oboi, both are wearing elaborate costumes. Princess Wanyan wears the jewelry appropriate for formal court occasions, though she is dressed in a semiformal winter dress. Her coronet is decorated with five gold-and-pearl ornaments. Similarly, the portrait of Prince Hongming shows him dressed in semiformal winter court dress. There is a dragon badge on his coat which signifies his court rank. His costume is typical of those worn during the Qing dynasty.

Many critics have said that after spending a while looking at face after face, many of the portraits begin to look exactly the same. Perhaps this explains why so many museums outside of China have been unenthusiastic about exhibiting ancestor portraits. Regardless, it is worth a look, as the Freer and Sackler galleries Director Milo Beach noted, "Worshipping the Ancestors is the first exhibition in the West in more than a half-century to focus on Chinese ancestor portraits, and is both the largest and most rigorous in explaining the history and socio-religious importance of this category of painting."

Art Notes:

Worshipping the Ancestors: Chinese Commemorative Portraits will remain on view at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery through September 9, 2001. The show will not travel.

All images courtesy of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.