Former Residence of Qi Baishi in Beijing

北京齐白石故居

The Former Residence of Qi Baishi 齐白石故居 (1863-1957), a well-known Chinese artist, is located near the western entrance of Picai Lane in the West City District.

Artists and VIPs from all over the world converged at Qi Baishi’ s home in the seven or eight years before his death in1957. Though the government had given him another house on the east side, he preferred his own garden, full of the more mundane crops, such as towel-gourd, peanuts, pumpkins, grapes and morning glory. His famous works“Towel-Gourd and a Bee,”“Grapes and a Dragonfly,” are all taken from the yard on Picai Lane.

Qi Baishi was born in 1863 in Xiangtan, Hunan province. He was a world-famous painter specializing in modern Chinese painting.

Qi grew up in a poor family. When he was only 14 years old, he became a woodworker. He studied flower carving at the age of 16 and, at age 27, began associating with intellectuals and artists to learn drawing, poetry, and seal-cutting. While teaching outdoor painting, he had chances to visit many places in the north and south of China and earned a lot of money. Then living a simple rural life, he came back home.

In 1917, he settled in Beijing and continued to make a living selling pictures and carving signets. It was not until he was in his 60s that he formed his own painting style, a style that included shrimps, crabs, chickens, frogs and other animals as his subjects. Using magenta to paint morning glories, cherry blossoms and other flowers with dark colors, he was accomplished in combining the way of painting small animals by brushwork with the method of drawing flowers by big brushwork.

Landscape, people, flowers or animals, all of Qi's paintings were vivid and lifelike. His works were animated and interesting and suited both refined and popular tastes.

Qi summarized the theory of Chinese painting and educed a penetrating view that the best drawing of creatures was between likeness and unlikeness: too much likeness left no room for imagination, and too much unlikeness took away belief. His theory gave Chinese painting new vitality in the 20th Century.
Qi's former residence is located at 15 Kuache Lane, off Picai Road, in Beijing's West District. Urban construction has leveled all the original housing around it, and now only Qi's former residence is left.
Qi's former residence, facing east, is a traditional Chinese compound with three rows of rooms and a wall around a rectangular courtyard. This courtyard has fifteen houses, including three houses facing south. Qi's bedroom's in the easternmost area, with a living room in the middle and a studio in the west. Above the studio hangs a plaque that Qi inscribed himself.

Literati often visited Qi in his studio. The aroma of paper, ink, tea and flowers filled the courtyard. Qi welcomed into his home many famous people and artists from all over the world. To paint more vivid pictures, he built arbors, grew gardens and raised fish, birds, chickens and cats in his yard. These plants and animals became his models. He would watch them carefully, and then paint.

The shrimp drawn by Qi were widely known. In order to become familiar with the various shapes and postures of the creatures, he raised large shrimp in a vat and studied them. Qi mastered their characters and painted them at will with a switch from dark ink to light and from dry ink to wet. The shrimp in his pictures look just like those swimming in rivers. Under his hand a clean canvas changed into a limpid stream. This was the creativity that Qi brought.

Qi died at the age of 94 on September 16, 1957. His sons, daughters and other descendants still live in his residence.

Address: No.13 Kuache Hutong in Xi Cheng District (West City District)
Route：bus routes 7, 38
地址：北京市西城区跨车胡同13号
交通：乘7、38路车到辟才胡同站下车，路东辟才胡同内