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 landscapes and calligraphy, created by Xugu in the final year of his life, offers an intimate window into the meditative inner world of one of the Qing dynasty's most singular painters. Xugu spent years as a military officer before withdrawing from public life to become a Buddhist monk, and that tension between worldly experience and spiritual retreat runs through everything he painted. Working primarily in Shanghai, he became associated with the city's emerging school of individualist painters, though his style remained distinctly his own — spare, cool, and quietly eccentric. His brushwork carries an angular restraint that sets him apart from the looser spontaneity of his contemporaries, each stroke feeling considered rather than instinctive. The album was made as a gift for Liu Songfu, a practice common among scholar-artists of the period, where painting and calligraphy together served as both artistic statement and personal correspondence. That the Art Institute of Chicago holds all 25 leaves intact is something of a rarity for an album of this age. A hand-painted oil reproduction translates the delicate tonal range and compositional stillness of Xugu's ink work into a medium that honours both the intimacy of the original and the enduring quality of oil on canvas.