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

Created in the final years of Xugu's life, this album of landscapes and calligraphy stands as a quietly personal testament to one of the Qing dynasty's most distinctive painter-monks. Xugu — born Zhu Huairen, later ordained after the devastation of the Taiping Rebellion — developed a style that sat apart from the decorative excess fashionable in late-nineteenth-century Shanghai. His brushwork is spare and slightly trembling, full of deliberate irregularity: trees lean at odd angles, ink washes pool unevenly, negative space does as much work as the marks themselves. This album, gifted to the scholar Liu Songfu around 1895–96, weaves landscape leaves with passages of calligraphy, a format that treats painting and writing as a single unified act rather than separate arts. Xugu was reputedly so attached to the goldfish he kept in his studio that he refused to eat fish — a detail that speaks to the tender, attentive quality that runs through all his work, including these landscapes. The hand-painted oil reproduction translates Xugu's meditative brushwork into a richly textured surface, preserving the contemplative rhythm of the original while giving it the presence and depth of oil on canvas.