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 intimate album of landscapes and calligraphy, created in 1895 or 1896, stands as one of Xugu's final works — a late-career gift to a friend that distills a lifetime of quietly radical brushwork into a series of spare, luminous leaves. Xugu occupied an unusual position in the late Qing art world: a former military officer who became a Buddhist monk and eventually a leading figure of the Shanghai School, he painted with a deliberate awkwardness that set him apart from academic convention. His brushstrokes carry a trembling, hesitant quality — not from weakness but from intention — and his compositions breathe with open space in a way that feels startlingly modern. The pairing of landscape imagery with calligraphy here reflects a classical Chinese tradition where image and text are considered equal in artistic weight, neither subordinate to the other. Xugu was famously reclusive and refused to paint on demand, making dedicated gifts like this album particularly meaningful within his small body of surviving work. This hand-painted oil reproduction translates the album's layered washes, ink rhythms, and meditative stillness onto canvas with care, preserving both the intimacy of the original format and the distinctive quality of Xugu's late brushwork.