Hu Gui ?-1812

signed chen Hu Gui, with two seals of the artist, chen hu gui yin, gong hua, and two Emperor Jiajing's collector seals, le shou tang, jia qing yu lan zhi bao

Note: Wu Gui, hao Yuexiang, was a native of Suzhou. His dates are unknown. Originally a court musician, he was summoned to serve at the inner court by the Qianlong Emperor because of his talent in painting landscapes and ability to imitate Yun Shouping’s style extremely closely. According to historical records, fan paintings bestowed by the inner court on princes and other aristocrats were all painted by Wu. Conscientious, humble, and elegant, he did not regard honors and fortune highly, and thus few people outside the court knew of him. The National Palace Museum in Taipei holds approximately five albums of landscape paintings, seven hanging scrolls, and one hand scroll by Wu. They are not dated, but bear the simple signature, 'Respectfully painted by the servant Wu Gui.' The hand scroll, entitled Illustrations by Wu Gui of Imperial Poems on the Six Views of the Temporary Palace of Longfu Temple, bears Qianlong’s inscription ‘imperially written on the fifteenth day of the second months of the dingmao year.’ If Wu Gui painted it in the dingmao year, then the documentation that Wu ‘was still painting at court in the fourth year of the Jiaqing reign (1799) at the age of over fifty’ seems open to doubt. The present album has eight leaves mounted in accordion form, such that they can be viewed either individually or as one continuous scroll. It is not only similar in mounting and decoration to the two other albums by Wu, entitled Mist over a Landscape and Pure Elegance of Waters and Trees, in the collection of the National Palace Museum in Taipei, but is comparable to the latter too in its elegant and finely-detailed brushwork. The three albums were probably created around the same time.