Green Chinese Jar

About this artwork

This painting shows a large pale green urn and a small figure of a Chinese scholar. After the fall of the Qing, China’s last imperial dynasty, hundreds of thousands of porcelains, paintings, and sculptures made their way out of China and into Western hands. A Chinese jar described as “pale green . . . on an ebony standard” was given as a gift at the society wedding of Countess Alice S. Szechenyi and Count Bela Hadik in 1931. Ruth Payne Burgess’s painting reflects the vogue among fashionable ladi...