German Princess Portrait Embroidery is a small piece of silk embroidery made in 1909 by Shen Shou. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston lists her as Yu Shenshou, which was the family name she used after she married Yu Jue. The picture is stitched on satin silk and shows a round portrait of a German princess. She wears a big hat covered with flowers and a white feather, a pink dress and a pearl necklace, and the portrait sits inside a light-colored frame with a small golden crown on top. The picture itself is only about 12 centimeters wide, so the stitches had to be very tiny to make a face with soft shadows. Shen Shou was famous for this kind of work. She joined the old Suzhou way of embroidery with ideas from Japanese embroidery and the way European oil painters used light and shadow, so her pictures look almost painted instead of sewn. Her portrait of the Queen of Italy, made around 1909 and 1910, won prizes at the fairs in Nanjing and Turin and was sent to the Italian court as a gift from China. This princess portrait comes from the same time in her life. Later she taught at a school started by Zhang Jian in Nantong, and her style became known as Shen embroidery, which China recognized as an important national tradition in 2008. The museum record says the piece passed through the Weng family and came to the museum in 2018 as a gift in honor of Weng Tonghe.
This exquisite 1909 silk embroidery by Shen Shou is a superb mixture of traditional Chinese Suzhou embroidery techniques, Japanese methods, and European principles of light and shadow. Only about 12 cm wide, the embroidery is made using very small stitches in satin silk, which creates an amazing painterly effect, resulting in a striking portrait of a German princess in a floral hat with a white feather, a pink dress, and a pearl necklace.
Besides being a prime example of the art of Shang Embroidery, this portrait also has symbolic significance. It was created when traditional Chinese crafts such as embroidery were increasingly introduced to the West, where they were regarded as exotic skills. In an effort to adapt Chinese embroidery to Western tastes, Shen created this masterpiece that depicts Western clothing and uses techniques similar to oil painting. Remarkably, the embroidery had been owned by the Weng family before it was donated to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2018. Thus, Shen’s innovative skills of “Shen embroidery” that elevated embroidery to the level of painting continue to inspire Chinese people to this day.
