Album of Landscapes and Calligraphy for Liu Songfu

Xugu · Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 1895/96

Medium

Album of 25 leaves; ink and light color on paper

Original size

Each leaf: 30.5 × 36.3 cm (12 × 14 1/4 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

This album of twenty-five leaves stands as one of the most intimate works from Xugu's final years — a sequence of quietly observed landscapes paired with calligraphy, suffused with the restrained melancholy that defined his late style. Xugu spent much of his life as a Buddhist monk, moving between temples near Yangzhou and Shanghai, and his painting reflects that inward quality. He was associated with the Shanghai school but remained an eccentric outlier within it, preferring ink washes of spare, almost dreamlike landscapes over the decorative flourishes fashionable among his contemporaries. His brushwork is unhurried — each leaf in this album feels like a private thought rather than a public statement. The album was created as a personal gift for Liu Songfu in 1895 or 1896, the last year of Xugu's life, which lends it an elegiac weight that scholars have long noted. Unlike the commissioned works he famously resisted, pieces like this were made entirely on his own terms. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates Xugu's delicate ink washes and atmospheric depth into a format that holds its presence on a wall, preserving the meditative stillness of the original while giving it a permanence the paper leaves were never designed to carry.