Artists › Painters and Calligraphers
Xia Gui
Southern Song academy painter from Qiantang whose half-filled ink landscapes earned him the name Half-Side Xia, paired with Ma Yuan as Ma-Xia
A desk holds an unrolled sheet bearing three bold black ink strokes, with a rack of many brushes above it, a stone ink slab and ink stick, a porcelain bowl, a red lacquer box, a dish of red seal paste and a paperweight; a small seated figure shows through a round window onto bamboo.
Also known as Zi Yuyu · Xia Banbian
Xia Gui, courtesy name Yuyu, came from Qiantang and served as a painter-in-attendance at the academy under Emperor Ningzong, who gave him the gold belt of honour. Xia Wenyan's Yuan catalogue *Precious Mirror of Painting* (*Tuhui baojian*) says he began with figures and turned to landscape, texturing rocks with a worn brush charged with water so the ink ran freely, a manner later called 'dragging mud and trailing water'. He tended to mass his scenery on one side of the picture and leave the rest as open river and sky, so he was known as Half-Side Xia and paired with Ma Yuan as Ma-Xia. *Pure and Remote View of Streams and Mountains* (*Xishan qingyuan tu*), an ink handscroll nearly nine metres long in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, is accepted as his work. Dai Jin and other Zhe school painters of the Ming modelled their brushwork on Ma and Xia.
Life and times
Dates c. 1180 CE–c. 1230 CE