China: 'Leaning on a Couch Watching Magpies', from the 'Yongzheng shier meiren tu' or...

When Yongzheng was still a prince, he commissioned a beautiful set of paintings for the purpose of decorating a screen in the Deep Willows Reading Hall, a study within his private quarters at the Summer Palace. An imperial garden to the northwest of Beijing, the Summer Palace was presented to the young prince in 1709 by his father the Kangxi emperor (r. 1662-1722). An item found in the archives of the Internal Affairs Department notes that in the eighth month of 1732, ten years into Yongzheng's reign as emperor, the twelve paintings were removed from the screen and individually stored. The record suggests that the scenes in these paintings show the Summer Palace as it looked when it was relatively new, before the lavish expansions that were undertaken later in the eighteenth century.