Refusal

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. One of the most famous early figural paintings playfully portrays the master himself, refusing a drink of wine offered to him by a guest whom he had in fact himself invited to partake of wine. Qi Baishi’s relatively faithful self-portrait (the figure on the right refusing the drink with a raised left hand) testifies to the fact that he was a skilled figural painter. Owing in part to collector Vojtěch Chytil, who befriended the artist, the Czech Republic houses one of the largest collection of Qi Baishi’s artworks in the West – the National Gallery alone has more than a thousand of his paintings.