Qi Baishi

Qi Baishi the Chinese painter (1864-1957) who rose from a poor peasant and carpenter's apprenticeship to become one of the greatest masters of the traditional brush. His lively and spontaneous paintings of shrimp, flowers, insects and vegetables, rendered in bold ink with touches of colour, brought to the literate art of his time a fresh and popular vitality.

Early Life and Craftsmanship

Qi Baishi was born Qi Huang on 1 January 1864 in Xiangtan, in Hunan province, into a poor peasant family. He had only a brief schooling and worked as a child in the fields and tending cattle, and at fourteen he was apprenticed to a carpenter, becoming skilled in carving and in fine joinery that taught him the patience and accuracy of hand and eye. His talent for drawing had been evident since childhood, and a patron noticed his work and encouraged him to study painting.

He took up the brush seriously in his late twenties, learning first portrait and figure painting and then the modes of the scholar-amateur tradition, and he also studied poetry and seal carving, the three arts that would remain joined in his practice. For much of his early career he supported himself by painting portraits and by carving seals for the gentry. The years of obscurity gave him a powerful discipline of observation and a technical foundation on which his later, freer manner was built.

The Five Departures and the Shanghai Influence

In his late fifties Qi Baishi set out on the journeys that he later called his five departures, travelling through China to see its landscapes and to break away from the fixed patterns of his early training. He learned particularly from the work of the Shanghai masters of the literati tradition, above all the individualist painter Xu Wei and the Qing artist Bada Shanren. He settled in Beijing in 1919 and thereafter made his home there, though he remained attached to his native Hunan.

His meeting with the older painter Chen Shizeng, who recognised his talent and encouraged him, helped him to establish himself in the capital, where he eventually won a wide following. His mature style emerged slowly, and he spoke of the necessity of changing as one grows old. He rejected the stiffness of imitation and sought a way of painting that was at once expressive and true to the object, and he came to value the bold and the spare over the refined and the crowded.

Subject and Technique

Qi Baishi painted the small things of daily life: a plate of loquats, a mouse and a candle, a bunch of grapes, a cricket on a flower, and above all shrimp. He raised these humble subjects to the level of great art, and in doing so he refreshed a tradition that had come to depend heavily on set themes and conventional symbols. His most famous works depict shrimp, whose translucent bodies he rendered with a few modulated strokes of ink, capturing their movement and their very constitution.

He developed the brushwork for this over many years, and the apparent ease of the paintings conceals long and patient study. He worked with a combination of broad, wet strokes and fine, dry detail, often placing bold flower forms against delicate insects, and he used colour sparingly and decisively. His seal carving and his poetry were integral to his art, for he saw painting as one element of a unified practice of brush and ink.

Recognition and Honour

Qi Baishi's reputation grew steadily and reached a peak in his old age. He was elected to the Chinese Artists Association and honoured by the new government after 1949, and in 1953, at the age of eighty-nine, he was named a People's Artist, a distinction that acknowledged both his art and his humble origins. He received international recognition as well, and in 1955 he was awarded the International Peace Prize.

His works were shown abroad and his fame spread to collectors and museums around the world, and his late paintings, looser and more daring than ever, were especially admired. Prices for his pictures rose steadily, and he became one of the most sought-after Chinese painters of the century. He continued to paint into his nineties with undiminished energy, and he gave freely of his time to young artists. His house in Beijing has been preserved as a memorial museum, where his seals and paintings are kept.

Legacy

Qi Baishi died in Beijing on 16 September 1957, at the age of ninety-three. In his long life he advanced from village carpenter to the most famous Chinese painter of his age, and he did so without ever abandoning the popular feeling of his origins. His influence on later Chinese painting was profound. He showed that the highest art could be made from the simplest subjects, and his combination of vigour and tenderness, of technical precision and apparent spontaneity, set a model that many later artists sought to follow.

He stands as the last of the great masters of the literati brush and as a bridge between the elite painting of the imperial past and the broader audience of the modern age. His shrimp and his flowers are among the most beloved images in Chinese art, and his name is a byword for vitality. In a career that lasted more than seventy years he produced thousands of works and taught countless pupils, and his memory is honoured by artists who value both skill and sincerity.

See also

• Chinese ink painting
• Literati painting
• Beijing Academy of Painting
• Seal carving