
Landscape and Figure, from an album of Landscapes and Calligraphy for Liu Songfu 山水册页
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 leaf, painted by the Buddhist monk-artist Xugu in the final years of his life, distills a landscape into something spare and quietly meditative — a lone figure dwarfed by mist-softened hills and pale, receding space. Xugu (1823–1896) was one of the leading voices of the Shanghai School, a loose circle of painters who bridged classical Chinese traditions with a more personal, sometimes eccentric sensibility. His brushwork carries a distinctive cool restraint — slightly angular, never lush — and his palette favors washed greys and diluted earth tones over the saturated hues of his contemporaries. This album, created for the scholar Liu Songfu, is a refined example of the literati gift tradition, where painter and recipient shared a language of cultivated allusion. Xugu completed this album just a year or two before his death, making it among the last sustained bodies of work he produced. The piece now resides in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Our hand-painted oil reproduction translates Xugu's restrained ink-and-color work into oil on canvas with careful attention to his tonal economy, preserving the sense of breath and distance that defines the original without overworking what the artist chose to leave open.
Hand-painted oil reproduction
Painted in real oil on stretched canvas by master copyists. Delivered unframed — ready to frame at home.
Choose a size
In Xugu's style.
Send us a photograph of your family, pet, or home — we'll paint it as a custom oil on stretched canvas in any style you like. From £220.

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Calligraphy Accompanying Xugu's Painting
Xugu · Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 1897

Calligraphy Accompanying Xugu's Painting
Xugu · Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 1897

Album of Landscapes and Calligraphy for Liu Songfu
Xugu · Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 1895/96


