Imperial Portrait of a Prince

This painting is a life-size portrait of a Qing dynasty prince sitting on a red lacquer throne and wearing a dragon robe. Behind him is a screen richly decorated with nine dragons. Virtually every element of this painting symbolically represents the hierarchy of the Chinese court. Portraits of this scale, painted in exceptional detail with the finest mineral pigments on the most expensive silk, were typically hung in the great halls of the Forbidden City, the imperial palace in Beijing. The largest group of such portraits remains in the imperial collection itself, now in Taiwan.