Qi Baishi (1864-1957) was a Chinese painter who began as a village carpenter in Hunan, taught himself to paint from a printed manual, and became the most beloved ink painter of modern China. He is remembered above all for his shrimp, drawn in a few gray strokes with no water on the page.
Few great painters started further from a studio. Qi was the child of a poor farming family, a boy too frail for the fields who was put to a carpenter's bench at fourteen. He died in Beijing at 93, the head of the country's artists.
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People who meet Qi Baishi through his shrimp tend to take him for a lucky amateur. The picture looks so easy: a few gray strokes, two long feelers, and no water drawn anywhere. A carpenter's son with a manual and a pot of ink, one would think, could simply have stumbled onto it.
The record says otherwise. He kept live shrimp for decades to watch how they moved. He trained in a meticulous style, drawing every hair and scale, before he threw it away. And when a friend carried his paintings to Tokyo in 1922, they sold. The ease on the paper had been paid for with most of his life.
The painting that finally set his price was not a shrimp at all. It was a landscape he painted in 1925, and for decades almost nobody outside China would have guessed it.
What You'll Discover
How a carpenter picked up a brush.
Who told him to forget his training.
What he kept alive to paint it.
Whether Picasso really knew his name.
Which painting broke the record.