Gai Qi (; 1774–1829),

courtesy name A courtesy name (), also known as a style name, is a name bestowed upon one at adulthood in addition to one's given name. This practice is a tradition in the East Asian cultural sphere, including China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam.Ulrich Theobald ...

Bowen 伯蕰,

art name An art name (pseudonym or pen name), also known by its native names ''hào'' (in Mandarin), ''gō'' (in Japanese), ''ho'' (in Korean), and ''tên hiệu'' (in Vietnamese), is a professional name used by East Asian artists, poets and writers. The ...

s Qiliang 七郎 and Yuhu Waishi 玉壶外史, was a poet and painter born in western

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

during the

Qing dynasty The Qing dynasty ( ), officially the Great Qing,, was a Manchu-led imperial dynasty of China and the last orthodox dynasty in Chinese history. It emerged from the Later Jin dynasty founded by the Jianzhou Jurchens, a Tungusic-speak ...

. As an artist, he was active in

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flow ...

. His paintings mainly concerns plants, beauty, and figures. However he also did numerous landscapes. In poetry he preferred the rhyming ''ci'' form and added such poems to his paintings. His social circle included prominent literati as well as artists. He organized both a literary society and a Buddhist lay society. His work often used a delicate ''baimiao'' (outline) style, which can be clearly seen in his illustrations for the novel, ''

Dream of the Red Chamber ''Dream of the Red Chamber'' (''Honglou Meng'') or ''The Story of the Stone'' (''Shitou Ji'') is a novel composed by Cao Xueqin in the middle of the 18th century. One of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, it is known for ...

''. The illustrations are chiefly portraits of the main characters in the novel. Numerous poets, including the renowned woman poet

Zhou Qi Zhou Qi ( ; born 16 January 1996) is a Chinese professional basketball player who last played for the South East Melbourne Phoenix of the National Basketball League (NBL). He has been a regular member of the China men's national basketball tea ...

, wrote poems to accompany the illustrations. The scholar Wang Qisun (王岂孙) commissioned Gai Qi to paint an album of famous Chinese women, both historical and legendary. Wang's second wife, Cao Zhenxiu wrote poems about the women and produced the calligraphy in the album. Gai took as a student the talented woman painter and poet Qian Shoupu (錢守璞) (c. 1801–1869). He was associated with the painter

Fei Danxu Fei Danxu (; 1801–1850) was an itinerant Chinese painter during the Qing Dynasty.Barnhart: Page 378. Fei's courtesy name was Zitiao (子苕), and his art names were Xiaolou (晓楼) and Huanxisheng (环溪生). A later pseudonym was Ouweng (� ...

in what has been called the "Gai Fei" school. Gai's grandson continued the tradition of the Gai Fei school, along with the descendants of Fei Danxiu. He is perhaps best known today for the ''Hongloumeng tiyong'', a book of portraits of characters in the ''Dream of the Red Chamber'' accompanied by poems about the characters. Gai's work is held in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, including the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

, the

Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...

, the

Johnson Museum of Art The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art ("The Johnson Museum") is an art museum located on the northwest corner of the Arts Quad on the main campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Its collection includes two windows from Frank Lloyd Wr ...

, the

Palace Museum The Palace Museum () is a huge national museum complex housed in the Forbidden City at the core of Beijing, China. With , the museum inherited the imperial royal palaces from the Ming and Qing dynasties of China and opened to the public in 192 ...

, the

British Museum The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...

, the

University of Michigan Museum of Art The University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, Michigan with is one of the largest university art museums in the United States. Built as a war memorial in 1909 for the university's fallen alumni from the Civil War, Alumni Memorial Hall ori ...

, the

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston The Museum of Fine Arts (often abbreviated as MFA Boston or MFA) is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts. It is the 20th-largest art museum in the world, measured by public gallery area. It contains 8,161 paintings and more than 450,000 works ...

, the

Princeton University Art Museum The Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM) is the Princeton University gallery of art, located in Princeton, New Jersey. With a collecting history that began in 1755, the museum was formally established in 1882, and now houses over 113,000 works o ...

, and the

Indianapolis Museum of Art The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) is an encyclopedic art museum located at Newfields, a campus that also houses Lilly House, The Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park: 100 Acres, the Gardens at Newfields, the Beer Garden, and more. It i ...

References

Sources

*Chinese Paintings in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford(45)

Oxford Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

China on-site
*''Zhongguo lidai shinü huaji'' 中國歷代仕女畫集 (A collection of paintings of women through the ages) edited by Guo Xueshi 郭学是and Zhang Zikang. 张子康 (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin meishu chubanshe and Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1998). *''Hidden Meanings of Love and Death in Chinese Painting: Selections from the Marilyn and Roy Papp Collection.'' Edited by Chun-yi Lee. (Phoenix: Phoenix Art Museum, 2013), esp. pp. 36–42. {{DEFAULTSORT:Gai, Qi 1774 births 1829 deaths Qing dynasty painters Qing dynasty poets Painters from Shanghai Poets from Shanghai Buddhist artists