Detail: Faces of China: Chinese Portrait Painting of the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368–1912) will be the first exhibition in Europe to explicitly focus on Chinese portrait painting. Portrait painting has a history of over 2000 years in China. In the period from 1600 to 1900 it experienced a heyday, stimulated by the arrival of Italian Jesuit painters around 1600, bringing with them European portrait-painting techniques. Presenting an unparalleled selection of over 100 portraits from the collections of the Palace Museum in Beijing and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the exhibition covers a span of 500 years, focusing particularly on the Qing dynasty. During this period portraiture reached a previously unknown level of variety, encompassing formal court and ancestor portraits, military portraits, and informal portraits of artists, officials and talented women.