Album of Landscapes and Calligraphy for Liu Songfu

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

Medium

Album leaves; ink and 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 intimate landscape vignettes and calligraphy, created by Xugu in the final years of his life, offers a quietly personal glimpse into one of the Qing dynasty's most singular artistic minds. Xugu — born Zhu Huairen, later ordained as a Buddhist monk — became one of the leading figures of the Shanghai school, where he developed a style that set him apart from his peers. His brushwork is deliberately spare, almost trembling, with an eccentric looseness that gives his compositions an air of solitude and introspection. Unlike many contemporaries who leaned into decorative richness, Xugu preferred restraint: muted washes, unpredictable compositions, and a quiet tension between emptiness and form. This album was created as a gift for Liu Songfu, a practice common among scholar-artists of the period — a deeply personal mode of artistic exchange that treated painting and calligraphy as inseparable expressions of character and friendship. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates Xugu's delicate ink-and-color leaves into a new medium with care, preserving the rhythmic stillness of the original while giving each scene the warmth and presence that only a painted surface can hold.