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. And had it not been for
this service on the part of Dr. Hopkins, I am afraid I should
never have received the promised picture, for he hesitated as to
the propriety of him, a court painter, doing pictures of Her
Majesty for his friends. However as he often thereafter found it
necessary to call Mrs. Headland to minister to his wife and
children he came to the conclusion that it was proper for him to
do so, and one day he brought me the picture.
The Empress Dowager not only loved to be painted as the goddess
of mercy, but she clothed herself in the garments suitable to
that deity, dressed certain ladies of the court as her
attendants, with the head eunuch Li Lien-ying as their protector,
ordered the court artists to paint appropriate foreground and
background and then called young Yu, her court photographer, to
snap his camera and allow Old Sol the great artist of the
universe with a pencil of his light to paint her as she was.
One day while visiting a curio store on Liu Li Chang, the great
book street of Peking, my attention was called by the dealer to
four small paintings of peach blossoms in black and white, from
the brush of the Empress Dowager. These pictures had been in the
panels of the partition between two of the rooms of Her Majesty's
apartments in the Summer Palace, and so I considered myself
fortunate in securing them.
"You notice," said he, "that each section of these branches must
be drawn by a single stroke of the brush
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