Qi Baishi

Biography

On one of his late scrolls Qi Baishi left an inscription that amounts to a complaint. He is already seventy-eight years old, he writes, and people keep saying that all he can paint is shrimp. “How unfair!” His shrimp really are his best-known subject: a few strokes of watery ink give a translucent, slightly curved body, while the long feelers spread across the paper in thin, dry lines. Still, the grievance is easy to understand. He painted mice and birds, insects and grasses, vegetables, toys, mountains, people, farm tools, almost everything he saw around him.

His date of birth is not entirely clear. The date most often given is 1 January 1864, but 22 November 1863 also appears, as do earlier years, as far back as 1860. The place is not in doubt: the village of Xingdou in Xiangtan County, Hunan Province, then still part of the Qing Empire. The family were poor peasants; besides his parents, the household included his grandfather and grandmother and eight younger children.

The boy began learning to read and write at nine. He was sent to study with his grandfather, and the paper, brushes and books were bought with money the family had put aside with great difficulty. A year later the lessons had to stop: he was needed at home, so he herded cattle and gathered brushwood. He did not stop drawing, but there was no paper, and he used sheets cut from old account books, their clean reverse sides. His health was too poor for farm work, and at twelve he was apprenticed to a carpenter. The workshop gave him, to my mind, no less than a village school would have done. He carved animals out of wood, made snuff boxes and cut blocks for popular prints of gods and heroes of folk legend. Carving stayed with him for the rest of his life, and many years later he proudly called himself “the rich man of three hundred stone seals”.

At first he taught himself to paint. An old printed manual, The Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting (芥子園畫傳), came into his hands, and he copied from it; for figures he used actors from the local opera as models, and later anyone he knew who would agree to sit for him.

At twenty-eight he became a pupil of the painter Hu Qinyuan and took up guohua painting in earnest. His grounding was in the gongbi manner, painstaking, with fine line and detailed finish, and he was taught that everything in a picture matters, from the choice of subject to the way the ink settles on the paper. Landscape he learned from his next teacher, Tan Pu. Yet Qi Baishi became famous for a quite different manner, free and quick, known as xieyi, “writing the idea”.

His model was Xu Wei, a painter who had lived three centuries before him. In one poem Qi Baishi regrets not having been born three hundred years earlier: he could have ground ink and prepared paper for Xu Wei. He repeated the thought in his diary, naming several other old masters who were not afraid of a bold stroke, and added that he would sooner have starved at their doors than go away.

From 1902 to 1909, when he was about forty, he travelled around China, visiting scenic spots. On these journeys he came to know the work of the Shanghai School and met Wu Changshuo, who became another teacher to him. Back home he built a house, wrote poems and painted from memory the mountains he had seen on the road. The result was a series of fifty landscapes; painter friends later added poems and colophons to them.

In 1917 he came to Beijing and stayed there for the rest of his life.

In Beijing he became close to the painter Chen Shizeng. He came to be regarded as a mature master after the age of fifty-five: his line grew sharper, and plants increasingly took the place of animals and birds. His seals were criticised for not keeping to the old rules. In his diary he replied that the ancient carvers had been people too, and that carvers of the present might have their own particular qualities. He never had any formal education, not even primary schooling, and yet at sixty-six he was invited to be a professor in the painting department of a Beijing art school. Among his students was the painter Hu Jieqing, wife of the writer Lao She.

He put his aim simply: in conversation, speak of what people understand; in painting, paint what is in front of one's eyes. On another occasion he said that a painting should lie somewhere between likeness and unlikeness. There is no Western influence in his work, and in this he differed from many of his contemporaries.

He greeted the Communist Party's rise to power in 1949 with fear. He confided to the painter Xu Beihong that if he did not leave the country he might pay with his life. When officials finally came to see him, they spoke of their admiration for his work. From then on things went well: his outwardly traditional subjects, far from politics, spared him interference, Mao Zedong collected his paintings, and the artist himself likened his pictures of farm tools to peasant labour. I think this turn explains a good deal about his late fame. In 1953 Qi Baishi became the first chairman of the China Artists Association, the Ministry of Culture gave him the title “Great Artist of the Chinese People”, and in 1954 he was elected a deputy to the National People's Congress. That same year he was among the authors of the collective painting Hymn to Peace, presented by Chinese artists to the World Assembly for Peace. In 1956 he was awarded the International Peace Prize.

Qi Baishi died in Beijing on 16 September 1957, at the age of ninety-three. His house in Beijing is open as a museum, there is another in Xiangtan, and next to it a park with a monument. His works are held in many museums, including the Hermitage and the Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow. His sons and grandsons went on painting in his manner, and traces of his painting can be seen in the animated films of the director Te Wei. In 1958 a postage stamp was issued in his memory in the USSR, and in 2008 a crater on Mercury was named after him.