Yang Guifei

Held in the Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago (accession 1925.2146), Yang Guifei is a [chuban](/glossary/chuban) color woodblock print measuring 27.9 by 18.7 centimeters and dated to 1765. The subject is Yang Guifei (Japanese: Yokihi), the celebrated Tang-dynasty Chinese consort of Emperor Xuanzong (eighth century CE) whose tragic love story, immortalized in Bai Juyi's poem the 'Song of Everlasting Sorrow' and continuously reworked in subsequent Chinese and Japanese literary tradition, supplied later East Asian art with its archetypal subject of beauty undone by political catastrophe. Yang Guifei was a perennial favorite of Japanese [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) artists who depicted her either in her court splendor or in the aftermath of her forced execution at the Mawei post station, and her Heian-mode classical associations made her a natural subject for the cultivated 1765 calendar circle.