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 late album by Xugu distils a lifetime of wandering and contemplation into twenty-five intimate leaves, where spare ink washes and quiet calligraphy share the page as equals. Xugu spent much of his adult life as a Buddhist monk, moving between temples and the bustling art markets of Shanghai, and that double existence shaped everything he painted. His brushwork carries an unmistakable trembling quality — lines that seem to breathe rather than simply describe — achieved through a dry-brush technique that breaks traditional tonal certainty into something more provisional and alive. Created for a friend in 1895 and 1896, just months before the artist's death, the album reads as both a gift and a reckoning, the landscapes stripped to their essential mood rather than their surface detail. Xugu is known to have kept squirrels, goldfish, and other small creatures in his studio, studying their movement — a habit that fed the restless energy visible even in his still landscapes. A hand-painted oil reproduction translates this contemplative work into a new medium while honouring its restraint, preserving the delicate tonal range and the unhurried quality of line that make the original so quietly compelling.