Houses in a Bamboo Grove at the Foot of the Mountains

Qi Baishi is a major 20th-century Chinese painter who created a characteristic ink painting style of landscapes and figures, which made him famous in the 1920s and 1930s not only in China, but also Japan and Europe. This painting depicts several simple dwellings half hidden in a bamboo thicket, crouched at the foot of a majestic range of mountains. Qi painted this topic repeatedly throughout the 1930s, presumably as a reference to the Southern Chinese landscape, where he grew up. Owing in part to collector Vojtěch Chytil, who befriended the artist, the Czech Republic houses one of the largest collections of Qi Baishi’s artworks in the West – the National Gallery alone has more than a hundred of his paintings.