Fu Baoshi Figure Paintings: The Nine Songs and How to Judge Them

Hold a Fu Baoshi figure painting at arm's length and the first thing you notice is how little of the paper is spoken for. A woman stands among falling leaves, her robe a few wet sweeps of ink that spread outward while the sheet was still damp, and the ground beneath her is barely there at all. Then step in close to the face. The eyes are drawn with a line so fine it looks like a hair laid on the surface, unhurried and unbroken, and they are looking somewhere past you. That gap — a face rendered with a jeweller's patience inside a body dissolved into wash — is the whole argument of his figure work.

This guide walks you through the classical subjects Fu Baoshi drew from the Nine Songs, the poem cycle that supplied most of them; how his line and his ink wash divide the labour between face and robe; how the wartime years outside Chongqing shaped the pictures collectors most want; how inscriptions and seals date a sheet; and what to look at before buying anything offered as his.

Who Fu Baoshi was

Fu Baoshi (1904–1965) came from Nanchang in Jiangxi and trained himself largely out of books and copies before studying in Japan in the 1930s. He took the name Baoshi, "embracing stone", out of admiration for the early Qing monk-painter Shitao, whose chronology and seals he spent years researching as a scholar. That double life matters: he was an art historian who painted, and the historical subjects he chose were ones he had already read about at length.

He is best known now for landscape, and for the broken, splintered texture stroke that carries his name. But the figures are the older habit, and for many collectors they are the more distinctive body of work. He painted them throughout his career, in editions of the same subject repeated across decades, and he treated them less as portraits than as apparitions — figures summoned out of a poem rather than posed in a room.

What the Nine Songs are

The Nine Songs, Jiu Ge, are a cycle of eleven pieces in the Chuci anthology, the southern body of verse associated with the poet Qu Yuan and the ancient state of Chu. Despite the title there are eleven, not nine. Most are addresses to deities: the Lord in the Clouds, the Lord and the Lady of the Xiang, the Greater and Lesser Masters of Fate, the Lord of the East, the River Earl, the Mountain Spirit, with a hymn to fallen soldiers and a short ritual close.

They are shamanic invocation poems, and their voice is one of longing across a distance that never closes. The god is called, the god does not arrive, and the singer is left with wind, water and falling leaves. Fu Baoshi painted the cycle repeatedly, and understanding the poems explains why his figures so rarely meet the viewer's eye. They are not waiting for you. They are waiting for someone who does not come.

The Lady of the Xiang

Xiang Furen, the Lady of the Xiang, is the subject he returned to most often and the one the market knows best. The poem opens with the goddess descending to the northern islet, autumn wind on the water, leaves coming down over the waves — and Fu Baoshi's compositions almost always hold to that image rather than illustrating a narrative.

• The falling leaves. Small, dark, dry-brush marks scattered through the upper field, often the only busy passage in the picture. They set the season and give the eye something to measure the emptiness against.
• The averted gaze. The head is usually turned three-quarters away or the eyes lowered. A version in which the figure looks squarely out is unusual and worth a second look.
• The unresolved ground. No horizon line, no bank, sometimes a suggestion of water in a single pale wash. The figure floats in unmarked paper.
• The trailing sash. Ribbons and sleeve ends drawn out in long wet strokes that read as wind, doing the work that a landscape setting would otherwise do.

He painted other deities from the cycle as well, the Mountain Spirit and the Lord of the East among them, and drew on other classical sources — scholars in landscape, drinking parties, historical figures from the poems and essays he knew. The Xiang subjects are simply the ones that recur.

How the figures are drawn

The technical interest of a Fu Baoshi figure lies in the division of labour across a single sheet. Faces, hands and hair are drawn with a fine, even, continuous line in the tradition running back through Chen Hongshou to Gu Kaizhi — the archaic "gossamer thread" manner that keeps a constant width and never swells for emphasis. Robes are then laid in with a large soft brush carrying dilute ink, often on damp paper, so the edges bloom and blur.

The two do not blend. Look at where a sleeve meets a wrist and you will usually find the fine line simply stopping and the wash taking over, with no transition drawn to reconcile them. That deliberate mismatch is a signature habit, and it is one of the harder things for a copyist to reproduce convincingly, because it requires the confidence to leave the join unresolved.

Colour, when it appears, is sparing: a rust or vermilion at the lips and sash, occasionally a mineral blue-green in the hair ornaments, sitting on top of the ink rather than mixed into it. The way a painter handles those earth and mineral colours is worth studying in its own right, and our guide to Chinese painting mineral pigments covers how they were ground and why they behave differently from plant dyes.

The landscape behind the figures

Where a setting does appear, it is built from the same broken, dragged strokes he used in pure landscape — a splintering texture applied with the side of a worn brush, laid down fast and then pulled together by a wash. It reads as rain, mist or rock face depending on what surrounds it. Anyone approaching his work from the landscape side will find the vocabulary explained in our guide to Chinese landscape painting, which sets out how texture strokes function within the tradition he was arguing with.

The wartime years he spent in the hills outside Chongqing, from the late 1930s into the mid-1940s, are the period most often singled out. He was working on poor paper, in a damp climate, in a small house, and the pictures from those years tend to be smaller, wetter and more concentrated than the large public works of the 1950s and 1960s. Figure subjects from this period are the ones specialist dealers watch for.

Reading the inscription and the seals

Fu Baoshi inscribed most figure paintings, usually with the title of the subject, a place, a date in the cyclical calendar and his signature. The inscriptions are written in a compact, slightly cramped running hand that sits low in the composition and is rarely more than a few columns.

• The date. Given in the sexagenary cycle rather than a Western year, sometimes with a reign-free reference to the wartime capital. Converting it is the first step in placing a picture.
• The place name. References to the Chongqing years appear in a handful of recurring forms and are a strong period indicator when the rest of the sheet agrees.
• The seals. He used a substantial number over his career, cut by himself and by others, and their sequence is documented in the scholarly literature. Our guide to painting seals and collector marks explains how to tell an artist's seal from a later collector's addition.
• The signature. Compare the character forms against securely published examples rather than against other pictures on the market; the reference material on Chinese artist signatures sets out a workable method.

What the market looks like

Fu Baoshi sits at the upper end of the modern Chinese painting market, alongside the generation of Zhang Daqian and Qi Baishi, and his best figure paintings sell into that top tier at the mainland and Hong Kong auction houses. The consequence for a collector is blunt: the incentive to forge him is very high, and the supply of convincing forgeries is correspondingly large.

Prices spread enormously by period, size, subject and publication history. A well-published wartime Lady of the Xiang and an unrecorded small sheet with the same subject are not in the same market at all. Very little genuinely reaches the affordable end, and a cheap Fu Baoshi should be assumed to be a problem until proven otherwise.

What to check before buying

• Publication before opinion. Ask for the exhibition or catalogue references first. In this market a picture's paper trail carries more weight than any single expert's view, and the practicalities are set out in our guide to provenance documents.
• The face under magnification. Copies almost always betray themselves in the fine line: hesitations, retouched contours, a line that thickens where the copyist paused.
• Wash edges. Genuine blooms have soft irregular boundaries created while the paper was wet. Repainted or printed imitations show edges that are too even, or a texture that repeats.
• Later additions. Seals and inscriptions added to an unsigned old painting to raise its value are a standard trade practice; check whether the ink of the inscription behaves like the ink of the picture.
• Reproductions offered as originals. High-quality printed facsimiles circulate widely. Raking light will usually show whether there is any relief or absorption in the paper at all.

The long Chinese tradition of respectful copying complicates all of this, since a copy was not always made to deceive, and our article on the Chinese copying tradition explains how that practice differs from outright forgery.

Common questions

How many Nine Songs paintings did Fu Baoshi make?

There is no fixed number. He treated the cycle as a repertoire and returned to individual deities many times across roughly three decades, so multiple autograph versions of the same subject exist and are entirely normal. Two genuine Lady of the Xiang paintings in different collections do not cast doubt on each other. What matters is whether a given sheet holds up on its own evidence of line, ink, inscription and provenance.

Why do his figures look archaic rather than modern?

Because the line is borrowed on purpose. He drew faces in a manner associated with painters of the fourth and the seventeenth centuries, which gives the figures a deliberately antique bearing, and then set them in loose contemporary ink wash. The tension between the two is the point rather than an inconsistency. He was a historian of Chinese painting arguing that the old figure line still had work to do.

Are his figure paintings more valuable than his landscapes?

Neither category is uniformly worth more. Large landscape compositions from his later years and celebrated wartime figure subjects both reach the top of his market, while modest examples of either sit far below. Subject, date, size, condition and publication history decide the outcome, and a documented figure painting will generally outperform an undocumented landscape.

Can new collectors buy Fu Baoshi safely?

Only with real caution. The forgery rate is high, the price level rules out casual purchase, and attribution turns on evidence most buyers cannot assess unaided. Collectors who want to live with the imagery rather than speculate on it are usually better served by well-made archival reproductions, keeping study of the originals to museums and published catalogues until they know the hand well.

Further reading

• Zhang Daqian's Lotus Paintings — a contemporary working at the same market level.
• Qi Baishi: Red Flowers and Ink Leaves — the other great modern reinvention of brush and colour.
• The Chinese Hanging Scroll Format — how these figure paintings were mounted and meant to be seen.

Browse the collection

Kiln and Ink publishes limited-edition archival giclée reproductions of the twentieth-century Chinese ink masters, hand-numbered and issued with a Certificate of Authenticity, printed on heavy cotton rag so the ink washes keep the soft edges that make this work what it is. If the Nine Songs figures have drawn you in, the collection is the practical way to put that generation on a wall while you learn to read the originals.