On June 28, 2009，the renowned painter Qi Baishi’s work, "Mouse and Cat with Lamp", was sold for RMB 4.48 million at the 18th China Guardian Quarterly Auction.

In this painting, a mouse is standing on the top of a long pole where a lamp is hung. Under the pole is a cat. Despite the images simple composition, the dynamic and motionless elements are both there, creating an explosive situation. The images of mouse and cat contrast sharply with each other, which evokes a hearty laugh.

Moreover, the inscription on this picture is intriguing: “Last night I lit the lamp early and planed to go to bed soon. Since I’m poor, I put too little oil into the lamp to feed the mouse sufficiently. When the cat sneaked in, the oil had been gone and the lamp burned out.”

Qi Baishi (1864 - 1957), also known as Ch'i Pai-shih in the western literature, is perhaps the most well-known contemporary Chinese painter for the whimsical, often playful style of his watercolor works.

Brief Introduction to Qi’s Life

Qi was born to a low-income family from Xiangtan, Hunan Province, and lived with his parents, grandparents, and eight younger sisters and brothers. He went to school for less than a year due to illness. Many poor families in China during that period would have their children work with them on the farm, but Baishi was too weak to do much of the work. Therefore at 14, he became a carpenter.

While growing up, he came upon Drawing in the Garden of Mustard Seeds, sometimes known as Jieziyuan Huapu, a manual of Chinese painting complied during the early Qing Dynasty. This book sparked Qi’s interest in art and painting. Later on, he learned to paint by himself.

When Qi was in his twenties, there was a need for artists who could paint family portraits. He signed up for the job and decided to become a professional painter. He started learning from other painters and reading relevant texts.

Between 1902 and 1909, on invitation of friends, he travelled around in China, visiting famous scenic spots, meeting many people of different social status, and saw paintings by senior distinguished artists with his own eyes. This experience has widely broadened his horizon.

After all of Baishi’s travels, he built a house and settled down in Beijing. He began writing poetry about and painting some of the mountains he saw. These paintings became a series of fifty landscape pictures known as Jie Shan Tu Juan.

It wasn’t until Baishi was in his mid-fifties that he was regarded as a mature painter. His lines in painting became sharper and the subject matter in his works changed from an animal-life base to a more plant-life base.

In his later years, he continued to make "later-year innovations", when many of his works depict mice, shrimp, or birds. In 1953 he was elected to the president of the Association of Chinese Artists.

On September 16, 1957, Qi died in Beijing at the venerable age of ninety-six.

Characteristics of Qi’s Works

Some of Qi's major influences include the early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) painter Bada Shanren (or Zhu Da) and the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) artist Xu Wei.

Baishi had his own philosophy on painting which read: “In speech, use language that people can understand. In painting, depict things that people have seen”.

With this idea in mind, Baishi’s works feature the natural style, which are based on his life. The subjects of his paintings include almost everything, commonly animals, scenery, figures, toys, vegetables, and so on. Even though Baishi wasn’t the first artist to focus on small things in nature, he was acknowledged for his very beautiful and unique way of painting such common images.

Some artists praised him for his “freshness and spontaneity that he brought to the familiar genres of birds and flowers, insects and grasses, hermit-scholars and landscapes”.

One of Baishi’s earlier series of works — “The Carp” was praised because of its simple style without any excessive decorations or writings.

After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, Qi Baishi was known for not being too affected by the politics of the day. Through the harsh times, he kept his own values when practicing arts.

Qi also theorized in a painting of loquat that: “Painting must be something between likeness and unlikeness. If it’s much like the reality, the painting is vulgar, but if it’s not like the reality, the painting cheats the mass.”

He is especially good at describing shrimps. The spirit of shrimp and the way it floats above water are vividly illustrated with a little amount of ink.

Many paintings by Qi have smart and humorous titles and inscriptions, expressing his views of life. One painting of two chicks fighting for one angleworm is titled "Friends in the Past". A painting of cooked crabs in plate has the inscription, “Why don’t you move?” This implies Qi’s dislike for imperious or domineering people, which a crab symbolizes in Chinese culture.

Although Qi Baishi did not have any formal education or training in the field of art, he mastered many different techniques including calligraphy and seal-carving.