Yang Guifei

Held in the Clarence Buckingham Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago (accession 1925.2146), Yang Guifei is a 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 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.

The print belongs to the body of Hyakki designs from the 1765 e-goyomi calendar exchange, the campaign that produced the first full-color nishiki-e through unprecedented multi-block registration precision and elaborate decorative effects including metallic pigments and gauffrage. Hyakki's translation of the Chinese consort into the small chuban format and the classical-mode aesthetic of early nishiki-e exemplifies the way the 1765 calendar circle drew on a shared Sinitic literary culture that the prints' wealthy original recipients took as common cultural property. The Clarence Buckingham Collection's nearly complete holding of Hyakki's prints, donated to the Art Institute of Chicago by Kate Buckingham in 1925, makes the museum the principal modern resource for the artist's surviving designs.