Work
The vast majority of Xia's surviving works are small album leaves, the favorite genre of Song academy painters. His earliest drawings imitate the style of Li Tang, who became known for simplifying the earlier Song style. Instead of producing highly detailed, complex paintings, he limited his materials and thus achieved a more immediate effect. Li Tang had numerous followers, and Xia was one of them; however, as later works show, he soon developed a personal style. Examples of his work in the album leaf format include two ink on silk paintings in the Tokyo National Museum (one of which is from the famous Garden Plowed by the Brush (Hikkoen) collection): both feature perfectly balanced diagonal composition, in which the void and the solid mass play equally important roles, and a formidable ink technique. A somewhat similar album leaf, Sailboat in Rainstorm, is preserved in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Xia's techniques are even more impressive in his hand scrolls; however, few of these have survived. The most well known is the 9 meter (30 feet) long Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains (ink on paper). This work is preserved incomplete, missing a final section which bore the artist's signature. Extremely subtle, graded ink washes and overlapping brushstrokes created complex atmospheric effects of mist, sky, and infinity.
Other hand scrolls by Xia Gui include Ten Thousand Miles of the Yangzi River, which only survives in an unreliable 16th century copy, and Twelve Views from a Thatched Hut. The latter survives in several copies; the original is probably the fragmentary scroll in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, United States.
Hanging scrolls by Xia Gui are rare. the famous Rain Storm from the Kawasaki collection in Japan is now considered a copy. There are two possibly authentic hanging scrolls kept in the Freer Gallery of Art: Rapids in a Mountain Valley (also known as A Misty Gorge, survives without the top part which bore the signature) and Autumn Moonlight on Dongting Lake.
Contemporary accounts describe Xia as a painter who worked very fast, and with great ease. Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains is a work on paper, which absorbs ink quickly, and so must be an example of such spontaneous creation. Xia was also praised for his technical skill in drawing architecture and similar objects freehand, rather than using a ruler. Some sources mention the painter's preference for brushes with worn tips, used to avoid excessive smoothness, and "split" brushes, which allowed making two or more strokes at the same time.
Read more about this topic: Xia Gui
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“Writing a book I have found to be like building a house. A man forms a plan, and collects materials. He thinks he has enough to raise a large and stately edifice; but after he has arranged, compacted and polished, his work turns out to be a very small performance. The authour however like the builder, knows how much labour his work has cost him; and therefore estimates it at a higher rate than other people think it deserves,”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“Peace can endure only so long as humanity really insists upon it, and is willing to work for it and sacrifice for it. Twenty- five years ago American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered; we failed them, we failed them then, we cannot fail them again and expect the world to survive again.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)