Portrait of Lin Daiyu, heroine of “The Dream of the Red Chamber”

Qi Baishi is perhaps China’s best-known twentieth-century painter. He was a prolific artist whose long career spanned the most turbulent periods of Chinese history. He was witness to his country’s great efforts at modernization and to the protracted wars that culminated in the emergence of Communism at mid-century. Yet the paintings that gained him recognition reflect nothing of these titanic struggles. His popularity rested on his captivating renderings of small-scale life: shrimps and crabs, fruits and vegetables, birds and flowers, all caught with a vibrant, bold brush and lively colors that appeal very much to the modern sensibility and eye. In this painting we see Qi Baishi as a figure painter, a category for which he is less well-known in the West. He has taken inspiration from one of China’s great eighteenth-century novels, the Dream of the Red Chamber, and caught its heroine Lin Daiyu at a particularly sympathetic moment in the story when she rakes up dead flowers and recites a poem that ends poignantly with the lament: Òmen laugh at me for burying fallen flowers, but who will bury me when I die?Ó Although the novel took place in the Qing period, it retained its popularity into the modern era, especially in Shanghai, where Qi most likely painted this work. Clearly, he has depicted a twentieth-century woman here, wearing rouge and lipstick, looking coy but hardly demure. (From “A Handbook of the Collection: Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art,” 1998)